Power BI Hosted Services and Packaging

Joshua Trupin is a former Directions on Microsoft Analyst that wrote about Office 365 and Microsoft Services. Before joining Directions... more

The Power BI product family contains two services for hosting reports: Power BI service, which is available through Office 365, and Azure Power BI Embedded, which allows developers to share Power BI reports via Web sites and applications.

Power BI Service

The Power BI service is the main report-hosting repository that enables users to access and share reports, and it relies on other Power BI components to create and access reports. (For details of Power BI components, see the illustration “Power BI Components“.)

The hosting service is also the main mechanism for licensing access to the service. It is offered as a stand-alone subscription and is available in some Office 365 plans.

Service Overview

Reports and dashboards can be created using the Power BI Desktop, a free downloadable desktop report design tool that creates Power BI (PBIX) files, or Excel 2013 or higher. They can also be created programmatically via a Power BI Representational State Transfer (REST) API.

Once created, reports and dashboards are published to organizational workspaces, where users access them through a variety of client applications.

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