Power BI is a free, business analytics solution that turns unrelated sources of data of non-technical business owners into attractive, interactive and coherent insights and shares them across your organization or embed them in your website or app. It is meant for small as well as mid-size business owners.

 

Power BI’s user interface is quite easy to understand and use, especially for those who have experience using Excel. And its deep integration with other Microsoft products makes it a flexible tool that requires less upfront training.

 

Even though Power BI is capable of quick insights from an Excel spreadsheet or a local database, it is also enterprise-grade and robust that makes it ready for extensive modeling and real-time analytics as well as custom development. In other words, Power BI is your own personal and visualization tool, which can also function as the decision and analytics engine behind group projects, divisions or even entire organizations.

 

Key features include:

 

• Quick Insights: It allows users to create subsets of data and apply analytics to that information automatically.

• Hybrid deployment support: This provides built-in connectors in which Power BI can connect with numerous data sources from Salesforce, Microsoft and other vendors.

• Customization: This allows users to change the appearance of default reporting and visualization tools and import new tools to the platform.

• Cortana integration: This is a very popular feature on mobile devices where users can verbally query data using natural language and access results with Cortana.

• APIs for integration: This provides developers with APIs and sample codes for embedding the Power BI dashboard in other software products.