Updated: July 15, 2020 (May 11, 2015)

Power BI Component Overview

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Power BI, Microsoft’s hosted business intelligence (BI) service, uses on-premises and Office 365 components to access and transform data and create charts and other visualizations that are published to Power BI sites. This example shows an overview of the data sources and components used by the service.

Data are queried using Excel 2013 Power Query and Power Pivot (top center), which can access a variety of sources (far left), including Web-hosted public information (such as weather and geographic census data), application-hosted data (such as data in Salesforce.com and Dynamics CRM Online), on-premises data (such as SQL Server and Oracle), and Azure services (such as Azure Storage and Azure SQL Database).

Power Query and Power Pivot are used to access, combine, filter, and clean data prior to use in creating reports. Additionally, organizational-specific queries (created in Excel 2013 Power Query) can be shared with other users via the Data Catalog feature (bottom center), providing reliable and approved queries for nontechnical users.

Atlas Members have full access

Get access to this and thousands of other unbiased analyses, roadmaps, decision kits, infographics, reference guides, and more, all included with membership. Comprehensive access to the most in-depth and unbiased expertise for Microsoft enterprise decision-making is waiting.

Membership Options

Already have an account? Login Now