Updated: May 31, 2023 (August 15, 2021)
Charts & IllustrationsPower BI Report Design Tools Explained
Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) offering that contains 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 Power BI report design tools available for creating reports hosted in Power BI:
Power BI Desktop and Power BI Desktop for Power BI Report Server (top) are the main tools for building Power BI reports. They contain data modeling capabilities and a report design canvas where authors create datasets that can be hosted in the service and reports (saved locally as .pbix files) with features to guide users through pages of data to help with data analysis. Authors publish datasets and reports directly to Power BI back-end platforms. The two applications are free Windows desktop applications, available in 32- and 64-bit versions:
- Power BI Desktop is designed for the cloud services, is updated monthly, and allows authors
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