Power BI

The Microsoft-hosted Power BI service is an Internet-based platform for sharing refreshable reports with users, in a more timely and secure manner than distributing business intelligence (BI) reports by e-mail. Power BI is available as a subscription service in conjunction with Office 365. For most organizations, the service is less expensive to deploy than an outwardly facing on-premises solution.

Power BI Overview

Power BI reports are created using Excel 2013 or higher, Power BI Desktop (a free Windows desktop report design tool), and the Power BI portal. The tools include versions of Excel data features to access, combine, filter, and clean data and visualization features to create sophisticated charts, maps, and other data visualizations.

Resultant workbooks, containing visualizations and data, are published to Power BI repositories where they can be shared with others. For organizations using Power BI Pro, users can create refreshable reports that can connect to on-premises data. IT can provide curated reports, dashboards, and data sets through the service to help power users design reports and nontechnical users access company-approved reports for analysis. Reports can also be created and published programmatically via a Power BI API.