Introduction to Power BI; What is Power BI?

Power BI is not a new name in the BI market, components of Power BI has been in the market through different time periods. Some components such As Power BI Desktop is such new that released as general availability at 24th of July. On the other hand Power Pivot released at 2010 for the first time. Microsoft team worked through long period of time to build a big umbrella called Power BI, this big umbrella is not just a visualization tool such as Tableau, it is not just a self-service data analysis tool such as PivotTable and PivotChart in Excel, it is not just a cloud based tool for data analysis. Power BI is combination of all of those, and it is much more. With Power BI you can connect to many data sources (wide range of data sources supported, and more data sources add to the list every month). You can mash up the data as you want with a very powerful data mash up engine. You can model the data, build your star schema, or add measures and calculated columns with an In-Memory super fast engine. You can visualize data with great range of data visualization elements and customize it to tell the story behind the data. You can publish your dashboard and visualization tool in cloud and share it to those who you want. You can work with On-premises as well as Azure/cloud based data sources. and believe me there are much more things that you can do with Power BI which you can’t do with other products easily.