Power BI for Office 365 Brings Self-Service Business Intelligence to the Cloud

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Posted by Amy Green
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Yesterday at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced Power BI for Office 365, a new self-service business intelligence (BI) solution delivered through Excel and Office 365, which provides businesses with data analysis and visualization capabilities to derive deeper insights from both their on-premises and cloud data.

Business data continues to grow at an exponential rate and employees are trying to make sense of the flood of incoming information in a more simplified, intuitive manner. Power BI for Office 365 dramatically reduces the barriers for businesses of all sizes to use and deploy familiar, yet powerful, self-service BI tools.

Excel is already a well-loved and familiar tool for analyzing data, so Power BI for Office 365 was built right into this experience and now includes:

  • Power Query, formerly known as "Data Explorer", enables users to easily search and access public information and their organization's data, including sources like Facebook, OData feeds, Windows Azure Marketplace, and big data solutions like Hadoop.
  • Power Map, previously known as codename "Geoflow", isa 3D data visualization tool for mapping, exploring and interacting with geographic and temporal data.
  • Power Pivot helps users create and customize flexible data models.
  • Power View creates interactive charts, graphs and other visual representations of data.

This comprehensive set of capabilities in Excel gives the more than one billion Office users the ability to do more with their data through easy-to-use tools that not only connect to traditional structured data, but also allows business users to easily connect to a Hadoop cluster in a company’s data center or to Windows Azure HDInsight in the cloud.

For more on this announcement, please see the SQL Server and Office 365 blogs.

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