Power BI

Power BI is a business analytics service by Microsoft. It aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end users to create their own reports and dashboards.

Power BI provides cloud-based BI services, known as “Power BI Services”, along with a desktop based interface, called “Power BI Desktop”. It offers data warehouse capabilities including data preparation, data discovery and interactive dashboards.

In March 2016, Microsoft released an additional service called Power BI Embedded on its Azure cloud platform.One main differentiator of the product is the ability to load custom visualizations.

This application was originally conceived by Thierry D’Hers and Amir Netz of the SQL Server Reporting Services Team at Microsoft. It was originally designed by Ron George in the summer of 2010 and named Project Crescent.

Project Crescent was initially available for public download on July 11, 2011 bundled with SQL Server Codename Denali. Later renamed to Power BI it was then unveiled by Microsoft in September 2013 as Power BI for Office 365.

The first release of Power BI was based on the Microsoft Excel–based add-ins: Power Query, Power Pivot and Power View. With time, Microsoft also added many additional features like Question and Answers, enterprise level data connectivity and security options via Power BI Gateways. Power BI was first released to the general public on July 24, 2015.