Power BI Explained

Power BI is Microsoft’s hosted business intelligence (BI) service and the focus for most of the company’s BI development. The service provides an Internet-based platform for sharing Excel reports among users, includes refreshable access to on-premises data, and has several interactive features for self-service analysis. For most organizations, the service is easier to manage and less expensive than deploying an outwardly facing on-premises solution for sharing reports, and it is more secure and timely than distributing reports as e-mail attachments. However, the service only accepts Excel workbooks, and Power BI presents security challenges of its own.

This chapter covers the current production release of Power BI, as of April 2015. The service is currently undergoing significant changes that are expected in late 2015. Those changes and features are discussed in “Power BI Roadmap 2015“.

How Power BI Works

The Power BI service 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 BI content. (For a visual overview of the service’s components, see the illustration “Power BI Component Overview“.)