Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop is a free Windows desktop client used to create Power BI (.pbix) reports. It allows report authors to create sophisticated reports with programmable filters and events to guide users through pages of data to help with analysis. The screen shot shows the main components of the report design tool.

The design canvas (center) is the heart of the tool where visual reports are created. Report authors select visual components (found under “Visualizations”) and data elements (found far right under “Fields”) and place the result on the design canvas, where they are sized and positioned by the report author.

A key feature of the tool is the ability to set multiple types of filters (found under “Filters”) and to link the filtering of visual components together. This allows users to select an element on one visual component and have it automatically filter the results of other visual components in the report. For example, if the user selects “Canada” from the tiles on the left, the other visual component will automatically filter analysis to Canadian data.