Power BI for Office 365

The Microsoft-hosted Power BI service is an Internet-based platform for sharing refreshable reports (Excel workbooks) with users, in a more timely and secure manner than distributing business intelligence (BI) reports by e-mail. Power BI is available as a subscription service in conjunction with Office 365. For most organizations, the service is less expensive to deploy than an outwardly facing on-premises solution. The current production version of Power BI relies on Excel and several other services (some on-premises and some in Office 365) that are used in various combinations to create, share, and interact with Power BI reports.

Production Version Utilizes Excel, SharePoint Online

The Power BI objective is to make Excel the integration point for creating BI content and enable users to leverage their knowledge of Excel to create reports with minimal assistance from the IT organization. However, the service also provides IT with the ability to manage important aspects of the environment, including security controls for accessing on-premises data sources and shared, controlled queries to help users create valid reports. The service also provides a more secure way for IT to distribute reports and spreadsheets than e-mail, and its report refresh capability makes it more likely that the reports will be up to date.