Power BI for Office 365 in Preview

Power BI for Office 365, currently in preview, brings many on-premises business intelligence (BI) capabilities of SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online and enables users to centrally share and collaborate using Excel to perform BI tasks. Power BI also allows SharePoint Online users to directly consume on-premises data through a new data management gateway and adds BI support for select mobile devices. However, Power BI is priced separately from existing Office 365 enterprise subscriptions and on-premises Excel licenses, it has no on-premises equivalent, and it may take some time to realize return on investment as users must learn how to exploit it.

End-User BI Based Around Excel 2013

Power BI, which is expected to move from preview to general availability in the first quarter of 2014, is designed to allow end users (who are called authors) to use Excel 2013 and the organization’s data sources to build sophisticated interactive BI solutions. By making Excel the integration point for BI, Microsoft is enabling authors to leverage their knowledge of Excel and create solutions with minimal assistance from IT. Power BI builds on several Excel 2013 features that can be used stand-alone, but it will likely be most useful to organizations when used collaboratively. These features include the following: