Power BI Report Design Tools: 2023

Multiple Power BI design tools are available to create reports and datasets, and four of the report design tools are shown here. Each report design tool can create reports in only one format, and most tools have two versions: a version for creating reports destined for a Power BI cloud service and a version for creating reports destined for Power BI Report Server on-premises.

The report design tools include the following:

Power BI Desktop (top) is the primary tool for building Power BI reports. It is a free Windows desktop application that contains data modeling capabilities and a report design canvas. Authors create multi-page reports (saved as .pbix files) using various visuals like bar charts, waterfall charts, timelines, and word clouds. They can also write processes to filter and slice the data and guide users through the report. The tool provides links to other Microsoft-hosted services, like Azure Machine Learning and Power Apps, that authors can use to perform advanced and custom data processes.