Power BI for Office 365

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

The Microsoft-hosted Power BI service, launched in Feb. 2014, an add-on for SharePoint Online (part of the Office 365 online service) that allows end users (who are called authors) to use Excel 2013 and the organization’s data sources to build sophisticated interactive reports, charts, and other BI solutions. Power BI builds on several Excel 2013 features that can be used stand-alone, but it will likely be most useful to organizations when used collaboratively. These features include the following:

Power Pivot enables users to design and load analysis data sets (called models) that summarize data from disparate sources into an Excel workbook.

Power Query enables authors to define queries that can connect to a variety of data sources (such as data stored in Web pages, SQL databases, and other sources), transform data from them, and load them into Excel workbooks or Power Pivot models. Power Query queries can be shared and managed through Power BI by “data stewards”, ensuring BI data originates from approved, managed, and secured data sources.

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