Power BI for Office 365

The Microsoft-hosted Power BI service, launched in Feb. 2014, is an add-on for SharePoint Online (part of the Office 365 online service) that allows end users (who are called authors) to use Excel 2013 and the organization’s data sources to build sophisticated interactive reports, charts, and other business intelligence (BI) solutions. Recent updates to online services, such as Dynamics CRM Online, are including Power BI features for new reporting and dashboard solutions. It is expected that the Power BI (and the underlying Excel 2013 features supporting Power BI) will continue to expand through more hosted business offerings.

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:

Power Pivot enables users to design and load analysis data sets (called models) that summarize data from disparate sources into an Excel workbook.

Power Query enables authors to define queries that can connect to a variety of data sources (such as data stored in Web pages, SQL databases, and other sources), transform data from them, and load them into Excel workbooks or Power Pivot models.