Power BI Components

The Power BI product family includes report design, hosting, deployment, and client components that combine to deliver a range of options for sharing reports with users. The normal process involves designing reports, publishing resultant reports to a hosting service, and providing access to users through client solutions.

Report design. Power BI reports (left) are created by authors using Excel 2013 or higher, with the tools for SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services, Power BI Desktop (a free Windows desktop report design tool), and programmatically via a Power BI Representational State Transfer (REST) API. The Power BI design tools include data features (Power Query and Power Pivot) to access, combine, filter, and clean data and visualization features (Power View and Power Maps) to create sophisticated charts, maps, and other data visualizations. Power BI Desktop also includes a design surface.

Developers can also create Power BI content packs that are sets of preconfigured organizational reports and dashboards that can be made available for Power BI users to select what’s most important to them. For example, production metrics can be produced as a content pack and users can select the products and departments that are most relevant to them, which can reduce the need for IT to build custom reports and dashboards.