💁 About this article
This article is part of Fugo’s Power BI knowledge base: a collection of resources answering common Power BI questions. We include notes throughout where Fugo’s integration may be helpful for displaying dashboards on digital signage.
Table of contents
Short answer
Power BI is used by analysts, managers, and operational teams across nearly every industry.
While it’s often associated with data analysts, many Power BI users are business users who rely on it to monitor performance, track processes, and make decisions based on shared data.
Power BI users inside organizations
In practice, Power BI tends to be used by several overlapping groups:
Data and BI teams
Build semantic models, clean and transform data, and create reports used across the business.Managers and team leads
Use dashboards to track KPIs, headcount, pipeline, budgets, and operational performance.Operations and finance teams
Monitor billing, revenue, costs, turnaround times, and exceptions that need attention.Sales and customer teams
Track pipeline health, deal performance, retention, and customer segmentation.
Many Power BI users are not writing DAX all day. They consume dashboards built by others and rely on them as a single source of truth.
What people actually use Power BI for
Despite the variety of roles, real-world use cases tend to cluster around a few patterns:
Consolidating data from multiple systems (CRM, finance, billing, HR)
Replacing large or fragile Excel files
Tracking metrics that need frequent updates
Allowing users to drill into data without manual filtering
Giving leadership a high-level view with the ability to zoom in
The value isn’t just in charts. It’s in centralizing logic and data so everyone is looking at the same numbers.
What Power BI is often mistaken for
Power BI is frequently pushed into roles it wasn’t designed for.
Common misconceptions include treating it as:
A general-purpose presentation tool
A replacement for SharePoint or internal websites
A simple charting layer on top of spreadsheets
While Power BI can display text, images, and interactive visuals, its strength lies in model-driven analytics, not document publishing or slide design. Many frustrations with Power BI come from using it for the wrong job.
Why Power BI shows up in so many roles
Power BI feels “easy” at first because basic visuals are quick to build. The harder work happens behind the scenes:
Data modeling
Relationships between tables
Cleaning and shaping inconsistent data
Designing reports that work for many users
This split is why Power BI often becomes a shared tool: a small group builds the foundation, while a much larger group relies on the outputs.
Summary
Power BI is used well beyond traditional data teams
Most users rely on dashboards rather than building them
Common use cases focus on monitoring, consolidation, and decision-making
Confusion often comes from using Power BI for tasks it wasn’t designed to handle
Understanding who Power BI is for helps set better expectations about how it should be used.
💡 Power BI on digital signage with Fugo
In many organizations, Power BI dashboards aren’t strictly viewed at a desk. They’re used by teams and managers who need shared visibility into metrics throughout the day. When dashboards need to live on office TV screens or operational displays, Power BI alone isn’t designed for that delivery model.
Fugo’s Power BI app provides a way to publish Power BI dashboards to digital signage securely. You can try it on a free trial or book a demo to see how teams use shared screens to make Power BI more visible.