Updated: May 31, 2023 (August 9, 2021)

Power BI Components 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 is Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) offering that contains tightly integrated software and Microsoft-cloud components, which are used to create and share datasets, data pipelines, reports, dashboards, and other forms of BI. The illustration shows the combined components that provide a unified platform organizations can use to replace existing BI deployments.

Report formats and design tools (top left). Content can include reports, Excel files, and traditional SQL Server Report Definition Language (RDL) tabular reports. Content is created by and shared between authors, developers, and users via the following tools:

Power BI Desktop, a free downloadable desktop report design tool for creating Power BI (.pbix) reports
Power BI portal (not shown), for creating hosted Power BI reports and metrics
Current versions of Excel, for creating Excel (.xlsx) workbooks
SQL Server Data Tools and Power BI Report Builder, a free downloadable tool based on SQL Server Reporting Services

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