Microsoft Power BI is embedded within Microsoft’s business applications solution and comprises a range of technologies such as Power Query and Power Pivot. Designed to provide the tools for aggregating, analyzing, visualizing and sharing data, this business intelligence platform is ideal for both technical and non-technical business users to be used in Android, Windows, and iOS devices. This next-generation business analytics tool developed by Microsoft goes beyond these existing Excel capabilities as it adds functionality for rich interactive visuals and dashboards with KPIs. A company can extract and transform data from multiple data sources with the use of Power BI. Hence, they can combine data into one data model for creating your reports.
- What are the components of Power BI?
Power BI offers several components with different purposes. Some of these are Power BI Service, Power BI Desktop, and Power BI Mobile.
2. Does Power BI produce paginated reports?
Power BI enables the developers to create formatted pixel-perfect reports in the Power BI Service and organizations to create fixed layout reports for printing and PDF creation. Paginated reports within Power BI allow the enterprises to create fixed layout reports. This feature is currently only available for the organizations licensed for Power BI Premium.
3. Is it possible to use Power BI for Budgeting & Forecasting?
It is true that MS Excel is still the number one choice for an organization's planning and budgeting process with a lot of complexities. But Microsoft’s Power BI is designed to draw data from multiple data sources including budgeting and forecasting data that can reside in an ERP system and Excel. It acts as a modelling and aggregation tool to aggregate separate planning datasets.
4. Is Power BI free? How is Power BI licenced?
Yes, you can download Power BI Desktop without paying anything to the parent company. To do that, you need to have a business email address. It enables any user to build reports without any hassle. If you want to share and distribute reports to other users within your organization, it becomes a paid requirement. Then, your organization needs a Power BI Pro licence and this is activated within the administration of Office 365.
Https://powerbi.microsoft.com/pricing/
Go through this link to known the licencing costs of this BI tool.
5. What is Power BI Premium and Embedded?
Microsoft has designed Power Bi for large-scale organizations with Power BI Embedded and Power BI Premium. Power BI Embedded is aimed at software developers and independent software vendors who wish to provide embedded analytics. It enables the application developers to embed Power BI reports within their applications. However, Power BI Premium comes with the ability to maintain on-premise Power BI reports. It allows enterprises to scale performance with dedicated hardware and capacity.