What is Power BI | Features of Microsoft Power BI | Basics of Power BI | Power BI Services | Power BI Desktop

Microsoft’s Power BI is a cloud-based, business analytics service by Microsoft for analyzing and visualizing data. 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 gives you a platform to be productive and creative with the reports and analytics. 

Power BI provides online SaaS (Software as a Service) service or cloud-based BI (business intelligence) services, known as "Power BI Services", along with a desktop-based application known as "Power BI Desktop" or mobile Power BI apps available on iOS and Android devices as well as for Windows phones and tablets. In addition to its feature of helping organizations collate, manage, and analyse data from wide variant data sources, the most predominant feature is its user-friendly interface. Creating out useful information from the data and creating report visualizations is a multi-step process which is explained in detail in our other blog posts. 

Primarily, Power BI collects data, transforms it and then turn it into intelligible insights, using visually appealing and easy-to-process charts and graphs. This in turn allows clients or users to generate, export, share and even schedule clear and useful snapshots of their business figures. In addition to converting data from various data source into interactive dashboards and BI reports, Power BI also offers other data warehouse capabilities including data preparation and data discovery. Power BI can connect to a range of data sources, from basic Excel spreadsheets to databases, and both cloud-based and on-premise apps and the list goes on. 

Power BI is popular for its versatility, interactivity, aesthetic designs, extensive connectivity to databases and ease of creating low-effort dashboards and also provides multiple software connectors and services. Power BI is primarily built on the strong foundation of Microsoft Excel application, and therefore the learning of Power BI is very easy as such, anyone who can use Excel can use Power BI, but performance wise Power BI is far more powerful than its counterpart. In March 2016, Microsoft released an additional service called Power BI Embedded on its Azure cloud platform. The main advantage of the product is its ability to load custom visualizations.