Issue No. 106June 2021

Learn from Your Business Data with Microsoft Power BI

We have received a few questions from clients recently around Microsoft Power BI, so we decided to dedicate this month’s article to this topic.

In a general sense, Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

Power BI is made up of two components:
• Power BI Desktop
• Power BI Service

The Venn Diagram below compares Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service, the area in the middle shows how the two overlap. Some tasks you can do in either Power BI Desktop or the service. The two sides of the Venn diagram show the features that are unique to the application and the service.

Power BI Desktop is a complete data analysis and report creation tool that you install for free on your local computer. It includes the Query Editor, in which you can connect to many different sources of data, and combine them (often called modeling) into a data model. Then you design a report based on that data model.

The Power BI service is a cloud-based service. It supports light report editing and collaboration for teams and organizations. You can connect to data sources in the Power BI service, too, but modeling is limited.

Most Power BI report designers who work on business intelligence projects use Power BI Desktop to create Power BI reports, and then use the Power BI service to collaborate and distribute their reports.

Source: Microsoft

To learn more about how to access Power BI, 
please contact our engineering team at:
Phone: 858-954-5400 x 0
Email: [email protected]