Introduction

Power BI is Microsoft’s BI product family that enables customers to share refreshable reports among users. Power BI has expanded from a business intelligence (BI) service for hosting Excel workbooks into a full product family that is less dependent on Excel and includes multiple report design tools, mobile applications, secure connectors to on-premises data, and developer options for delivering reports that reduce subscription requirements. Power BI reporting and dashboards are also appearing in other Microsoft products and services as the default BI solutions, which highlights its importance in Microsoft’s overall BI strategy. Understanding Power BI’s new features and roadmap will help organizations plan for the future and invest in the right BI technologies.

Power BI receives frequent updates (typically monthly). The actual features and capabilities of the production and preview environments continue to change; consequently, this report takes a snapshot of the service in the middle of 2016 and covers significant changes expected in 2016 and beyond. (For a visualization of how the components work together, see the illustration “Power BI Components“.)