What is PowerBI for Office 365?

What is it?

PowerBI for Office 365 is a self-service business intelligence solution that combines some familiar and emerging Excel data modelling and visualization capabilities with cloud-based collaboration capabilities. Many of the capabilities already existing with Excel and therefore PowerBI for Office 365 is an extension adding cloud-based collaboration capabilities.  

What can I do with it?

PowerBI provides the ability to easily search, discover and access data within and outside an organization. You can very easily analyse and create stunning interactive visualizations that very quickly uncover hidden insights - then share and collaborate these dashboards from anywhere on any device!

 

What does it include?

PowerQuery	The original code name was 'Data Explorer'; this is an Excel add-in that enables discovery & transformation of data. Data can be imported in from both internal and external sources
PowerPivot	An Excel add-in that enables modelling and data clean-up
PowerView	A feature of Excel and an add-in to SharePoint which enables creation of interactive charts, graphs, maps and other powerful visualizations to form a dashboard.
PowerMap	The original code name was 'Geo Flow' and it is an Excel add-in that creates interactive 3D visualizations of geographic data or timelines.
Power BI Sites	Collaborative BI workspaces in Office 365 for sharing data, queries, insights, workbooks & dashboards with colleagues. Data is kept up-to-date with connectivity and refresh back to on-premises data sources.
Q&A	Original project was known as 'InfoNavigator'; this offers natural language query capabilities that enable end users to ask questions (e.g. total sales for December') and get answers displayed with interactive charts and graphs based on available data.
Mobile BI	Mobile device support on Windows 8 & Windows RT for data visualization using HTML5.
Data Management Gateway	An application installed on-premises that enables data refresh from Office 365 to on-premises data sources. IT can control data sources published to PowerBI sites and control user access to the data.

 

In future up-coming posts I will go into more detail of each of the components.