Power BI Clients Explained

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

Power BI portal (top) is the default client for accessing reports and content and has the most features. It is the main focus of Microsoft’s development in client tools and provides exclusive features like a Home screen for organizing reports into dashboards, creating reports and key performance indicators (KPIs), and collaborating with other Power BI users. The portal also provides access to other Power BI content that users can create and share, such as semantic data models (datasets) and Dataflows pipelines. The portal contains features that are available in most clients, including the following:

• Data filtering
• Drill-down into data and reports
• Self-service analysis using the underlying data
• Open data models in Excel for additional offline analysis
• Data export
• Machine learning tools for automated data analysis
• Natural language query.

Power BI mobile apps (bottom left), available for Android, Apple, and Windows devices, enable viewing of reports on small form-factor devices. They include many of the Power BI portal capabilities and have special features to resize reports to help users view the data more easily. The mobile apps also have exclusive features like the ability to convert a picture of a data table into real data for analysis. The mobile clients work with most of the Power BI cloud back-end platforms (except for the embedded capacities) and the Power BI Report Server software on-premises.