Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is an interactive data visualization software product developed by Microsoft with a primary focus on business intelligence. It is part of the Microsoft Power Platform.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a unified, scalable platform for self-service and enterprise business intelligence (BI). It is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn various sources of data into static and interactive data visualizations. Data may be input by reading directly from a database, webpage, PDF, or structured files such as spreadsheets, CSV, XML, JSON, XLSX, and SharePoint.
Power BI Services
Power BI provides cloud-based BI services, known as “Power BI Services”, along with a desktop-based interface, called “Power BI Desktop”. It provides data warehouse capabilities including data preparation, data mining, and interactive dashboards. In March 2016, Microsoft released an additional service called Power BI Embedded on its Azure cloud platform. One main differentiator of the product is the ability to load custom visualizations.
History of Power BI
This application was originally conceived by Thierry D’Hers and Amir Netz of the SQL Server Reporting Services team at Microsoft. It was originally designed by Ron George in the summer of 2010 and named Project Crescent. Project Crescent was initially available for public download on 11 July 2011, bundled with SQL Server Codename Denali. Later renamed Power BI, it was then unveiled by Microsoft in September 2013 as Power BI for Office 365. The first release of Power BI was based on the Microsoft Excel-based add-ins: Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View. With time, Microsoft also added many additional features like question and answers, enterprise-level data connectivity, and security options via Power BI Gateways. Power BI was first released to the general public on 24 July 2015.
Conclusion
Power BI is a powerful tool that allows businesses to make sense of their data. It provides a way to visualize data and share insights across the organization, or embed them in an app or website. Its capabilities have made it a leader in the analytics and business intelligence platform.
Want to learn more and references:
www.en.wikipedia.org
www.powerbi.microsoft.com
www.learn.microsoft.com
