Power BI product overview

Microsoft Power BI is a web-based suite of applications for analyzing business data and sharing insights using rich visualizations. Power BI enables users to author reports using intuitive drag-and-drop tools, publish, and share amid others using the online Power BI Service. The Power BI Desktop can be used to create and distribute content for free, while the Power BI Pro web service can be used to monitor key data and share dashboards for a monthly fee. The Power BI Mobile app allows users to access and interact with data from any mobile device, and the Power BI Embedded function lets users embed visual and interactive reports into applications.

With Power BI dashboards, users get a full 360-degree view of their business that has all the key data metrics in one place, updated in real time, and available across all their devices. Dashboard creation is made easy via the hundreds of connections to other popular business applications available, and Power BI also comes with pre-built dashboards to help users get started quickly.

One of the platforms most impressive functions is its integration with Excel. Through Power BI, data in Excel can now be analyzed and manipulated in a host of new ways. Through cloud connectivity, data can be accessed from other areas of the business. Charts, data sets, and maps can be combined into one dynamic view so that multiple different data sources can be compared at once. Collaboration is made simple with Office 365 integration, where users can share their findings and data visualizations with anyone on their network and other Office 365 users. Power BI also offers a smart Q&A feature. Users type a question, and the platform provides the answer in the form of an interactive chart or graph.

Power BI interfaces with Power BI gateways to connect with and unify data, while Power BI Desktop for Windows provides local data mashup and report authoring features. It comes with 59 out-of-the-box connections for apps and services including Salesforce, Google Analytics, Azure, Zendesk, and more. With Power BI, users can gather data from all these sources to help create a full picture of key metrics that can then be queried using natural language. Power BI is used by developers, analysts, IT, and other business users.

Pros of Power BI

Insight management
Integration with MS products
Online forums and Learning Zones
Visualization tools
User friendly
Connects to hundreds of data sources
Easy to run queries
Easy to create charts, graphs, and reports

Cons of Power BI

Not as intuitive as some packaged applications
Not a good IDE for Python/R
Social media connectors could be improved
Desktop and web versions divide data prep tools
Refresh cycle is limited on free version

Breakdown of Core Features

ONE OF THE LARGEST AND FASTEST GROWING CLOUDS

Users can create and share interactive data visualizations all across the world via global data centers, which include national clouds to meet compliance and regulation needs.

UNIFY SELF-SERVICE AND ENTERPRISE ANALYTICS

Power BI helps users accomplish both self-service and business data analytic needs with a single platform by providing powerful semantic models, an application life cycle management toolkit, open connectivity framework, and fixed-layout, pixel-perfect paginated reports.

ACCELERATE DATA PREP WITH AZURE

With the no-limit Azure data lake, users are able to simplify how they analyze and share vast quantities of data. This helps greatly reduce the time needed for analysts, data engineers, and others to collaborate and gain insights for efficiency.

INDUSTRY-LEADING AI

The Microsoft AI helps non-data scientists prep data, build machine learning models, and gain insight from structured and unstructured data, including text and images.

EXCEL INTEGRATION

Connect Excel for queries, data models, and reports to Power BI Dashboards to gather, analyze, publish, and share Excel business data.

(Last updated on 02/28/2020 by Martin Shelby)