Power BI-New Version...

Microsoft is really pushing into the cloud space in a big way, making a lot of investments in the cloud and also related development tools. One of the aspects of cloud that was discussed in the Microsoft earnings report was about the self service BI tools especially related to Power BI. Power BI was a set of tools released by Microsoft to enable users to perform self service BI operations mainly aimed at the power users/systems analyst/financial analyst user base. It was different from the traditional data warehousing/BI tools that Microsoft has. With the recent release of Power BI Microsoft has decided to open up the door in a big way and allows users to play around with Power BI. On going to the web site http://www.powerbi.com, one is asked to enter a work email address and sign up for access. Once you setup an account, one gets to log in to the Power BI public preview page where one can see sample dashboards and charts, also there s a start up video for first time users who would like to go through the capabilities. Please refer to the screen below which shows how it looks when you first log into Power BI Public Review.

There are capabilities to create Reports, DataSets and DashBoards. When you click on the Get Data Option you are presented with the following options:

 The user gets a variety of option to play around with , it is interesting to see that it has connections to repositories like Github. The main purpose of this release seems to be get this in the hands of as many users as possible so that the features can be explored and analyzed, with that also get some serious interest generated around Power BI. Hope this blog article helps in exploring the Power BI and its features.