There’s a lot of chatter and interest in the Microsoft ecosystem around Power BI. Microsoft started down the road to develop a completely independent BI tool in 2013, and demand has grown rapidly in the ensuing years. If you’re not familiar with the offering, it’s a good time to begin learning.
We will start simple in this blog post, explaining the fundamentals and how you can get started using it for free—yes, we said, for free, in the form of Power BI Desktop. Power BI Desktop is the report authoring and ad-hoc data exploration tool. It’s a free application you install on your local computer.
Once you’ve installed the application, you can use it to connect to multiple different sources of data and combine them (often called modeling) into a data model. This data model lets you build visuals, and KPIs that you can share as reports with others inside your organization. Most users who work on business intelligence projects use Power BI Desktop to create reports, and then use the Power BI service to share their reports with others. Without using the service, you can’t share your analysis with other end users.
In a typical Power BI workflow, you begin by importing data, then building a report in Power BI Desktop, and finally publishing it to the Power BI service. However, you can also paste data directly into the Power BI Service. This functionality was announced in December via this Microsoft blog. Because the functionality just reached General Availability, you might consider waiting to roll it out on a large scale in your organization.
Microsoft provides this excellent primer for Power BI Desktop beginners.
Considering more advanced options
In future blog posts during the month of February, we’ll look at the various paid Power BI options for Microsoft 365 users. Power BI integrates with Office 365, and other Microsoft products and services such as Azure, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow, as well as Dynamics 365. But again, the integration functionality depends upon three things: the type of license and subscription you are using, where the content is stored, and the roles and permissions assigned to each user.
If you want to begin your own investigation, here are the major Power BI products and high-level licensing:
Power BI Pro: A subscription account based on per-user licensing that basically offers an enhanced version of Power BI desktop. The biggest difference between the Desktop and Pro version is that with Pro you can share your data, reports, and dashboards with other users who also have a Power BI Pro license.
Power BI Premium: Provides a different way to store content--in a virtual container called a capacity. With Premium capacity, anyone with permissions, whether they're inside or outside your organization, can view content without purchasing Power BI Pro or Premium per-user licenses.
Power BI Mobile: Allows users to stay connected to their data from anywhere, anytime with the Power BI app for Windows, iOS, and Android. Included in the price of Power BI Pro and Premium.
Power BI Report Server: Allows the deployment and distribution of interactive Power BI reports and traditional paginated reports on-premises within the boundaries of an organization’s firewall. It is available as part of Power BI Premium and through SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance.
Power BI Embedded: Platform as a service (PaaS) offering through Azure intended for professional developers and independent software vendors. Allows you to embed Power BI workspaces and dashboards within a web page or an app without building an analytics offering from scratch.
Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics: Think big data here! Newly released for enterprise customers, it is intended to bridge the gap between large volumes of structured and unstructured data, allowing BI analysts and data engineers to collaborate easily in a single development environment.
Axtegrity can help you muddle through this myriad of options and support you in determining the best and most cost-effective solution for your organization. Don’t hesitate to contact us today.