Updated: February 23, 2022 (February 9, 2020)

Power BI Components Overview

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) offering that contains several tightly integrated software and Microsoft-hosted components, which are used to create and share reports, dashboards, and other forms of BI.

Data integration and modeling tools (left). Data engineers create shared datasets using Power BI Desktop, Analysis Services semantic data models via SQL Server Data Tools, and data integration pipelines via Power BI Dataflows, which provides extract, transform, and load (ETL) features.

Report design tools (middle left). Power BI reports are created by authors, developers, and users using Power BI Desktop (a free Windows desktop report design tool), current versions of Excel, SQL Server Reporting Services tools, and programmatically via a Power BI REST API. Collaboration features include workspaces, which allow multiple users to work on data models and reports together.

Back-end hosting (middle right). The back-end infrastructure, sometimes referred to as a data and report repository, enables the following:

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