Power BI Basics

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

The Microsoft-hosted Power BI subscription service is an add-on for SharePoint Online (part of the Office 365 online service) that allows end users (called authors) to use Excel 2013 and the organization’s data sources to build sophisticated interactive reports, charts, and other BI solutions.

Power BI builds on several Excel 2013 features that can be used stand-alone by individuals, but it will likely be most useful to organizations when used collaboratively. These features include the following:

Power Pivot enables users to design and load analysis data sets (called models) that summarize data from disparate sources into an Excel workbook.

Power Query enables authors to define queries that can connect to a variety of data sources (such as data stored in Web pages, SQL databases, and other sources), transform data from them, and load them into Excel workbooks or Power Pivot models.

Power View enables users to design charts, animations, and other presentations for data analysis, and discover trends and anomalies from within Excel data, such as Power Pivot models and Excel workbooks.

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