Power BI Clients

Power BI includes clients that are used in combination with other Power BI hosting and data management components as a full-service reporting solution.

Report Formats Overview 

Power BI supports three report formats based on Microsoft technologies:

• Power BI reports (.pbix files) are the primary format, providing reports, dashboards, and metrics
• Excel workbooks (.xlsx files) are typical Excel workbooks that organizations use for routine business analysis
• Paginated reports (also called RDLs) are traditional data-driven business and operational reports based on SQL Server Report Definition Language (RDL).

Clients Overview 

Users access and interact with Power BI reports using a variety of clients:

• Power BI portal
• Power BI mobile apps
• Power BI app for Teams and Office
• SharePoint Online
• Custom applications
• Power BI Publish to Web.

(For further details, see “Power BI Clients Explained.”)

Updates and Roadmap 

Making reports and data available to users in more locations is always a key part of Power BI updates as it helps promote adoption. The recent trend of surfacing Power BI reports inside Teams and Office products continues, allowing users to see reports but also access their own Power BI home page, removing the need to access Power BI directly.