Power BI
A powerful BI tool that turns complex data into a clear visual picture.
Overview
Its strengths include versatile data modeling, clear visualizations, integration with Microsoft services, and strong security and sharing features.
Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence tool for gathering, analyzing, and reporting business data as interactive visualizations. Its interface is designed so end users can build the reports and dashboards they need themselves, without any coding skills. Power BI is part of Microsoft Fabric, where it serves as the BI and reporting tool alongside other Fabric workloads, but it works just as well as a standalone tool without the rest of the Fabric environment.
If you're already an Excel user, Power BI is often easier to pick up, since it's built on similar principles. That said, DAX functions differ from Excel formulas, and performance is in a completely different league from Excel workbooks. You can bring in data from a wide range of sources, from Excel files to large databases, from on-premises systems to cloud services. Read about why data integrations are best done through a data warehouse.
Pricing
The Power BI Desktop application is free, so getting started and building reports costs nothing. Cost only comes into play once you want to share reports with others, which requires a Pro license. For larger organizations' needs, such as Copilot AI features or bigger data models, there's a Premium Per User license or capacity-based Microsoft Fabric.
There are several license tiers, and the base pricing is per user. Cost scales with your needs: the entry-level license covers sharing reports and collaboration, while higher tiers add larger data volumes, more frequent daily refreshes, and AI features. Larger organizations can also use capacity-based Microsoft Fabric pricing, which has replaced the earlier standalone Premium capacities and can be more cost-effective when you have many viewers or need other Fabric tools.
Check Microsoft's official pricing page for current prices.
Food for thought
If you have little prior experience with BI tools or Power BI, it can take some time before you get comfortable using the tool. That investment pays off, though: the way you learn to model and report data keeps paying off as your reporting needs grow. Power BI works best when your organization already uses other Microsoft tools, such as Teams (where Power BI reports can be embedded directly), and when your reporting needs call for a more scalable or flexible solution than, say, Excel.
Power BI apps
Power BI Desktop : previously also known as Power BI Free. A Windows desktop application for exploring, editing, modeling, and building data into reports. Reports are typically built in Desktop, where all data modeling features are available, unlike in the Service. From Desktop, reports are shared with colleagues by publishing them to the Power BI Service, which requires a paid license; otherwise the reports are public and available to everyone.
Power BI Service : the cloud service where reports are published, and through which they're shared, managed, and viewed in a browser on any operating system. Using the service requires a license, such as Pro or Premium Per User. The license tier affects things like how much data you can process, how often it refreshes, and which AI features are available.
Power BI Mobile : a mobile app that provides secure access to Power BI reports and dashboards on iOS, Android, and Windows devices. You can view and share reports and run natural-language queries (if your license includes AI features). The app also lets you set up alerts for specific data changes.
Power BI Embedded : lets you embed Power BI dashboards and reports into other applications, so they feel to the end user like a seamless part of the application they're using.
Power BI Report Server : lets you run Power BI on your own on-premises server behind a firewall, when you don't want to or can't use Microsoft's cloud service.
Why choose Power BI?
Agile data connectivity
Power BI was originally built on top of Excel, and it integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products, such as Office 365 and SharePoint. Beyond Microsoft's own tools, you can also bring in data from other commonly used applications and databases. For example, combining Excel files stored in SharePoint with BigQuery tables from your data warehouse in the same report is straightforward.
Interactive reports built in Power BI can be embedded in other applications and used from within them. This is especially easy to do inside Microsoft's own products.
Powerful data processing and modeling
Power BI lets you combine, edit, model, and analyze business data in many ways. The easy-to-use Power Query data editor lets you prepare data, for example by renaming tables and columns and removing rows. You build a model that defines the relationships between tables and the metrics, after which you can explore it by filtering, drilling into details, and using built-in analytics tools. You get the most out of Power BI when it's fed data combined from multiple source systems.
Smooth, versatile reporting
Power BI reports can be used as-is in Power BI, but they can also be embedded elsewhere, such as in Teams, so data is available right where you're already working. Users can filter report data, drill into details, and build ad hoc reports to answer unexpected questions. Map visualizations provide clear geographic views within reports. When needed, reports can also be exported in several formats, and you can send automatic alerts and email distributions from them. Data stays up to date, since Power BI refreshes it automatically at the intervals you choose.
Ease of use
For Excel users, many of Power BI's features feel intuitive right away, and its clear visual style makes it approachable for everyone else too. Navigation is straightforward, and building reports works with drag and drop, no coding skills required. You can also explore data using natural-language queries (if your license includes AI features). Data is easy to work with in charts and graphs, easy to draw insights from across different areas of the business, and easy to share clearly across the organization.
In larger organizations, data models and reports are typically built by BI professionals, but Power BI also works well for people in many other roles. Sales, marketing, finance, and HR teams, for example, often track their own metrics and make decisions based on them. This works because each user or user group can have their own views built for them, showing only the information that's relevant to them. Users can also personalize their own dashboards and mark them as favorites to quickly get to the information they need.
Comprehensive security practices
Access to data can be restricted by user and role, for example with row-level security, and all data is encrypted both at rest and in transit. Power BI uses your organization's existing Microsoft Entra ID authentication and user groups, so you don't need to maintain access rights separately if the rest of your ecosystem is on Microsoft: when a user is added to or removed from a group, their report permissions update automatically. Content can be shared in dedicated workspaces, where you can assign users different roles, such as viewer, editor, or admin. This makes it easy to keep reports for different teams or projects clearly separated, for example.
Technical support for Power BI apps
Power BI's active user community offers online help for both general questions and troubleshooting specific issues. Microsoft also offers official support channels, the scope of which depends on your license and agreement. Check Microsoft's support pages for current details.
QuickBI helps develop your Power BI reporting
QuickBI's BI consulting helps organizations with Power BI from end to end, whether that means refining your existing reports, developing your reporting more broadly, or combining and visualizing the data behind it. We can work with you on a single project or as an ongoing, agile development partnership, whatever suits your needs. Power BI is one of the BI systems our customers use most, so we have years of strong hands-on experience with it.
When you're ready to take your Power BI reporting further, get in touch with QuickBI.
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