This is a continued from my previous blog on BI in Cloud. In this blog I will be discoursing Microsoft’s continued effort to bring BI in cloud with Power BI for Office 365.
I happened to in one Power BI mini conference here in Denver and I will share what I learn there, what I read and found from practice. Since this is fairly a new application and I will update this blog as I learn more about it.
But before I start just want to give my comment for Microsoft to please stop overloading the word POWER in every application they are creating I get tongue-tied and confusing one for the other with the existing ones and we have one more application with Power again. It started with PowerPoint, PowerShell, PowerPivot, Power Query, Power View, Power Map now Power BI. How about some cool names like Strong BI or Monster BI something we could all have fun and live with?
Power BI for Office 365 delivers self-service BI with the familiarity of Office (to discover, analyze and visualize) and the power of the cloud (to share, find and mobile). This creates scalable, manageable and trusted system.
With Excel 2013 helps us to create a Powerful self-service BI that we could:
Discover and Combine – Search and access internal & external data. Clear, transform and shape data. Merge and combine data from multiple sources. We have Power Query for Excel that we could use to discover from a traditional data sources such as our databases, data warehouse and cubes as well as we could discover new data from a web data sources such as Wikipedia and Facebook.
Analyze and Model – The new in memory analytics that we could model relationships, custom measures, hierarchies and KPI’s. We have Power Pivot for Excel and its modeling language DAX the we could writhe a powerful queries.
Visualize and Explore – This help us to easily present our data in most understandable ways and bring the data to life. It also helps up to discover hidden relationships and trends in our data. We have Power View for Excel that we could present the data in many intuitive charts and Power Map to present geo special data on map.
With Office 365 helps us to collaborate and stay connected that we could:
Share Data and Insights – Easily setup powerful BI sites, share live reports with data refresh from on-perm sources. Manage and share data sets and monitor usage. This is where Power BI in Office 365 comes in play.
Ask Question & Get Answers – Ask questions in the natural language speech bubble and get back answer as the system generates data visualizations.
Mobile Access – View Power View reports on any device with HTML5 support. Discover and explore all your reports with the mobile BI app. We could use a Power BI mobile app for this but I could only find Windows store and I could not find it in ITunes Store for Apple devices or in Google Play for Android devices.
The good news with Power BI is no credit card required unlike Azure trials so you could sign up and check out the application by following. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerbi/default.aspx#fbid=3Wtd8_aVOtO
In the coming blogs I will discuss on how to create a Power BI site collection on Office 365, create and upload a worksheet to Power BI site collection, how we could setup a data management gateway to our Power BI site, Power BI mobile application
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