Modern business operations generate a variety of data from processes such as sales, customer relationships, human resource management, and product ordering. These multiple data sources are brought into a single repository. Often data analyst create reports for decision makers to aid in decision making and organizational planning. 

Business intelligence (BI) tools are used to identify insights from data repositories. These BI tools connect to different data sources and enable data analysts to equip decision makers with relevant insights from the data. BI tools offer features that are useful for reporting, querying data, online analytical processing (OLAP), and data mining. In this article we will discuss each  BI activity and how they are supported in Tableau, QlikView, and Excel. Lastly, we will look at how PowerPoint can be used to prepare presentations to effectively communicate findings.