Introduction to the Power BI Service

We know that all BI projects typically involve within integrating data from multiple sources, performing data transformations, cleaning of data and complex calculations, analyze large data sets with rapid query response and create insightful reports and visualisations.

The basic goal of Microsoft Power BI is that to focus on business health and performance by gathering insights into business health process and provides a way to take corrective actions in a timely fashion.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is the collection of online services and features which provides an environment to promote self-service BI to the end user, support power query and power pivot. It provides a platform to end user to assist with data import, create datasets, and create reports and dashboards.

Power BI Service

The Power BI service is something that accessible to subscribed users. If user has 365 office licenses then general Power BI license is free. Once user is logon on Power BI Service (http://app.powerbi.com), user has access to personal workspace and group workspaces that contains building block elements such as datasets, reports and dashboards.  Power BI service supports power query features for data import, data transformation, power pivot and DAX used for data modeling. It also provides authoring environment for reports and dashboards also.

Central Power BI Concepts

Workspaces

It manages user context using workspaces where user is always running within the scope of a specific workspace such as personal workspace for each user. We can create team-based authorised Group workspace also through the Power BI service. A workspace is container with three collections such as dashboard, reports and datasets.

Dashboard: It provides consolidated view into reports and datasets and it is also entry point in custom solution for Power BI users.

Reports: They are collection of pages containing visuals and can be pinned to a dashboard.

Dataset: This is a collection of data model containing one or more data tables. It can be very simple or very complex based on the business requirement.