Why this matters
Power BI appears in many Ghanaian adverts for MIS officers, M&E officers, data analysts and business intelligence roles, usually alongside Excel. Where Excel reports are pages, Power BI reports are interactive: a manager clicks "Wa" and every chart on the page shows Wa only. Organisations use it to bring data from several sources into one place and keep dashboards up to date.
The three parts of Power BI
- Power BI Desktop is where reports are built. It is a free download and you can build and save reports without any account or licence. It runs only on Windows (Windows 10 or later).
- The Power BI service is the website where organisations publish, share and refresh reports. Signing up needs a work or school email; personal addresses such as Gmail cannot sign up directly. Sharing with colleagues usually needs a paid licence, which an employer would normally provide.
- The Power BI mobile apps let people view and interact with published reports on phones and tablets. They are for reading, not building.
Do you need a Windows computer?
For this section, yes, to do the practice yourself. Some honest options:
- A computer lab at school, a university, a library, a tech hub or your workplace. Ask whether you can install Power BI Desktop; the Microsoft Store version does not need administrator rights.