Microsoft Power BI Dashboards & Reporting
Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence platform that allows users to visualise and analyse their data. Leverage Power BI and share intelligence that generates buy-in, boosts business performance and ultimately takes your company to new heights.
Discover insights and make sense of your data
Whether you're a business analyst, data scientist, or anyone who's looking to use more data to make better decisions, Power BI empowers you to explore and visualise your data, uncover new insights and tell compelling stories with visuals that will leave a lasting impression.
Power BI gives you the ability to convert and analyse your data, then visualise it through interactive charts, maps and dashboards - making sense of all your organisation’s data in more ways than ever before. With it, you can uncover new insights , gain valuable measurement and track your businesses performance goals – all in one simple place.
Powerful intelligence
Here at Sope, we can help you leverage Power BI to gain deeper insights into your organisation’s performance by connecting people to the data around them.
Our consultants can help you take all the hard work out of creating powerful visuals so that you can spin up a beautiful report in just a few clicks. We specialise in the following services:
• Discover hidden insight in your data
• Up-to-the-minute analytics
• Interactive dashboards and intelligent reports from any device or location
What is Microsoft Power BI?
Power BI is Microsoft's business analytics platform. It connects to the systems where your data already lives, shapes that data into a model, and turns it into interactive reports and dashboards people can explore for themselves — rather than waiting on a spreadsheet someone emails around once a month.
The parts of Power BI
Power BI Desktop is the free Windows application where reports are built: connecting to data, cleaning it, defining relationships and measures, and designing the visuals. The Power BI Service is the cloud home where finished reports are published, shared, scheduled for refresh and secured. Power BI Mobile presents those reports on phones and tablets. Larger organisations increasingly run all of this inside Microsoft Fabric, which brings Power BI together with data engineering and warehousing on shared capacity.
How a Power BI report comes together
Connect. Power BI reads from hundreds of sources — SharePoint lists, Excel, Dataverse, SQL Server, Azure services, Dynamics 365, and most databases and SaaS platforms with an API.
Transform. Power Query cleans and reshapes the data: fixing types, splitting and merging columns, filtering out noise. This step is unglamorous and usually where the real effort sits.
Model. Tables are related to one another and calculations are written as measures using DAX. A well-built model is what makes a report fast, and what makes the same numbers agree wherever they appear.
Visualise and share. Reports are assembled from charts, tables and slicers, then published so the right people see the right slice of data — including embedded directly in SharePoint pages and Microsoft Teams channels, which is where we recommend most people actually meet their reports.
Power BI, Excel and the rest of Microsoft 365
Power BI is not a replacement for Excel, and pretending otherwise tends to end badly. Excel remains excellent for ad hoc analysis and modelling by the person who owns the numbers. Power BI is better when the same questions get asked repeatedly, when several people need a consistent answer, when the data is too large or too scattered for a workbook, or when a report needs to refresh on its own. Many organisations sensibly run both, and Power BI can read directly from the Excel files and SharePoint lists they already maintain.
What organisations use Power BI for
The most valuable early reports are usually unglamorous: financial and budget reporting, operational dashboards, project and capital tracking, service and case volumes, safety and compliance reporting, and HR measures like headcount, leave and turnover. Our work with Barossa Enterprises is a good example of reporting effort dropping sharply once the numbers assembled themselves.
Getting Power BI right
Power BI is easy to start and easy to sprawl. The common failures are familiar: a proliferation of near-identical reports nobody trusts, measures defined differently by different teams, dashboards that answer questions no one is asking, and no clear owner when a refresh quietly fails. Avoiding that is mostly discipline — agreeing definitions, building one reliable model rather than many fragile ones, and deciding who maintains it.
We help organisations start with a report that answers a question someone actually asks, then build out from there. Get in touch to talk through your data.
Store Once, Publish Everywhere
SOPE: Store Once Publish Everywhere - our name is our mantra. Imagine a single source of truth where business content is centralised, up to date, and can be accessed anywhere from any device.
How we helped Barossa Enterprises reduce reporting time by 50%
An App for Barossa Enterprises was developed to automate manual functions and generate the monthly NDIS report - which had many layers of oversight involved in managing.
Through automation, the integrity of the data remains intact, the time taken, and complexity, to produce the final report has been significantly reduced.
Microsoft 365 & SharePoint Consultants
Our team has helped hundreds of businesses undergo digital transformation by harnessing the power of Microsoft 365 & SharePoint. Backed by a team of Consultants and Developers, Sope can improve your business efficiency and drive cost reductions.
Modern Workplace
The Modern Workplace practice helps organisations create intuitive, secure and scalable digital workplaces that enhance collaboration, knowledge management and employee experience.
Information & Automation Services
The Information & Automation Services practice empowers organisations to optimise operations through intelligent automation, robust data governance and AI-driven solutions.
SopeCare
A trusted extension of your team. Always-on Microsoft 365 expertise to keep your digital workplace humming. Built for growing organisations who need more from Microsoft 365.
Most Common FAQs
What is Microsoft Power BI?
Power BI is Microsoft's business analytics platform. It connects to the systems where your data already lives, models that data, and turns it into interactive dashboards and reports your team can explore. It comes in three parts: Power BI Desktop for building reports, the Power BI Service for sharing them, and mobile apps for viewing on the go. Because it sits inside the Microsoft ecosystem, reports can be surfaced directly in SharePoint pages and Microsoft Teams.
Is Power BI included in Microsoft 365?
Partly. Power BI Desktop is free to download, and some Microsoft 365 plans include limited Power BI capability — but publishing and sharing reports with colleagues generally requires Power BI Pro or Premium Per User licences, with Microsoft Fabric capacity for larger deployments. Licensing shifts periodically, so we check what your tenant already includes and work out how many people genuinely need to author reports versus simply view them.
What data sources can Power BI connect to?
Hundreds — SharePoint lists, Excel, Dataverse, SQL Server, Azure services, Dynamics 365, and most databases and SaaS platforms that expose an API. Most of our clients start with data they already hold in Microsoft 365, prove the value quickly, then expand to other systems.
How long does a Power BI project take?
A focused first dashboard built on data that is clean and accessible is usually a matter of weeks. Timelines stretch when data sits across multiple systems, needs cleaning, or when different parts of the business define the same measure differently — that last one is people work, not technical work. We recommend starting with one report that answers a question someone actually asks, then building out from there.
Can Power BI reports be embedded in SharePoint or Teams?
Yes, and we almost always recommend it. Reports can be embedded in SharePoint pages and added as tabs in Teams channels, so people see the numbers where they already work instead of logging into a separate tool. It is one of the quickest wins we see on intranet projects — reporting stops being something people have to remember to go and look at.
We're ready to weave some magic for you. Get in touch today
Our friendly team are always available to offer advice and answer your questions.
