Microsoft Power BI Will Change The Way You Handle Your Data

July 25, 2014

Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 is a cloud based business intelligence (BI) solution. With features and services that allow you to make relationships with multiple different sources of data, visualize that data, and collaborate through an organization-wide self-servicing infrastructure.

Power BI Features and Services

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Self-Service Power BI Features in Excel – These features extend what you are familiar with in Excel and add some new features that you aren’t familiar with:

Power Query: Discover, reshape and comb through data coming from different corporate and public sources.
Power Pivot: Perform powerful data analysis, from vast amounts of data in Excel.
Power View: Interactive data visualization lets you create analytical views and reports.
Power Map: Create and navigate, geospatial data on a 3D map experience in Excel.

Power BI for Office 365 – These features amplify and extend the self-service Power BI capabilities in Excel, and make then available to your organization or the online public:

Power BI Sites: View, share and collaborate on reports with Power BI Sites.
Power BI Q&A: Use question based/natural language queries to find and report on all your data
Query and Data Management: Share your data sources and view query usage analytics
Power BI Windows Store App: View your reports via the mobile Power BI app.

Power BI IT Infrastructure Services – Get Power BI running in your organization and enable your IT staff to provide and manage Power BI services:

Provision Power BI for Office 365: Create a tenant, and get Power BI for your organization
Power BI Admin Center: Your organization’s Power BI infrastructure managed from one site
Data Management Gateway: Connect local data to the cloud, seamlessly and securely.

4 Ways Microsoft Power BI Will Change The Way You Handle Data

Create custom BI reports in hours instead of weeks: If your organization is in need of a BI application to provide in-depth market analysis and visual reporting. That can access available reports and generate new reports, while empowering business users and marketing managers to query internal and external data sets to potentially develop more insightful reporting. Then Power BI is what you need and it will change the way you handle your organizations data
Cut down Query times dramatically: Does your organization want to improve the performance of query times but are struggling with the millions of rows of table data that cause your queries to take up to 40 seconds? Well with leveraging SQL Server 2014, Azure HDInsight and Power BI for Office 365, your IT team can cut down query time dramatically.
Track, manage and cut down your energy consumption: Does your organization have multiple offices, buildings, or sites that you need to track and manage your energy usage and efficiency from? Well you can create a Power BI for Office 365-based solution, that will allow you to track your organizations energy usage over time. This solution will use Power Query, Q&A and Power Maps to ask questions of the data and get immediate answers and to display energy usage in a map-based format. This method can save your company on energy usage and your employees will be able to access the data throughout your organization.
Save time and money by controlling your data more cost effectively and efficiently: Do your employees on the road need spreadsheet reports via email, but unreliable internet connections getting in the way? If you switch to cloud-based Power BI for Office 365, you can potentially save a lot of money from those IT costs, and your employees can benefit from web based reporting from virtually any location.