Power BI Report Design Tools Expand

• Power BI Desktop adds report design features to help enterprises create more professional reports.
• Updates to Power BI Desktop have slowed to a manageable rate.
• A new Power BI Report Builder tool for paginated reports signifies a move away from the on-premises Report Builder used with SQL Server and Power BI.

Power BI is a set of Microsoft business intelligence (BI) technologies that includes several tightly integrated software and Microsoft-hosted components. (Components are discussed in “Power BI Components”.) This report covers updates and roadmap details for Power BI report design tools.

Report Design Tools Overview

Power BI supports reports in several report types, including .pbix files (the original Power BI reports format), Excel (.xlsx) files, and SQL Server Reporting Services (RDL) files. Report authors create reports with the following report design tools that are specifically designed for one of the supported report types:

Power BI Desktop is a free Windows desktop client used to create Power BI (.pbix) reports. Power BI Desktop allows report authors to create sophisticated reports and dashboards with features to guide users through pages of data to help with analysis. (See the illustration “Power BI Desktop.”)