Power BI is a business analytics service by Microsoft. It aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end users to create their own reports and dashboards.
Power BI provides cloud-based BI services, known as “Power BI Services”, along with a desktop based interface, called “Power BI Desktop”. It offers data warehouse capabilities including data preparation, data discovery and interactive dashboards. In March 2016, Microsoft released an additional service called Power BI Embedded on its Azure cloud platform. One main differentiator of the product is the ability to load custom visualizations.
Power BI made of 6 main components, these components released in the market separately, and they can be used even individually. Components of Power BI are:
- Power Query: Data mash up and transformation tool.
- Power Pivot: In-memory tabular data modelling tool
- Power View: Data visualization tool
- Power Map: 3D Geo-spatial data visualization tool
- Power Q&A: Natural language question and answering engine.
- Power BI Desktop: A powerful companion development tool for Power BI
There are many other parts for Power BI as well, such as;
- PowerBI.com Website; which Power BI data analysis can be shared through this website and hosted there as cloud service
- Power BI Mobile Apps; Power BI supported in Android, Apple, and Windows Phones.
Power BI components can be used individually or in a combination. Power Query has an add-in for Excel 2010 and Excel 2013, and it is embedded in Excel 2016. The add-in for Power Query is available for free! for everyone to download and use it alongside with existing an Excel (as long as it is Excel 2010 or higher versions). Power Pivot has been as an add-in for Excel 2010, from Excel 2013 Power Pivot is embedded in Excel, this add-in is again free to use! Power View is an add-in for Excel 2013, and it is free for use again. Power Map is an add-in for Excel 2013, it is embedded in Excel 2016 as 3D maps. Power Q&A doesn’t require any installation or add-in, it is just an engine for question and answering that works on top of models built in Power BI with other components.