Power BI

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Whether your data is a simple Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses, Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize (or discover) what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

Power BI can be simple and fast – capable of creating quick insights from an Excel spreadsheet or a local database. But Power BI is also robust and enterprise-grade, ready for extensive modeling and real-time analytics, as well as custom development. So it can be your personal report and visualization tool, and can also serve as the analytics and decision engine behind group projects, divisions, or entire corporations. Read More

Prerequisites

• If you're not signed up for Power BI, sign up for a free trial before you begin.

• Read Power BI service basic concepts

Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop is a free application you can install on your local computer that lets you connect to, transform, and visualize your data. With Power BI Desktop, you can connect to multiple different sources of data, and combine them (often called modeling) into a data model that lets you build visuals, and collections of visuals you can share as reports, with other people inside your organization. Most users who work on Business Intelligence projects use Power BI Desktop to create reports, and then use the Power BI service to share their reports with others.

Power BI Mobile Apps

Power BI offers a set of mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 mobile devices. In the mobile apps, you connect to and interact with your cloud and on-premises data.

Power BI Report Server

Power BI Report Server is an on-premises report server with a web portal in which you display and manage reports and KPIs, along with the tools to create Power BI reports, paginated reports, mobile reports, and KPIs. Your users can access those reports in different ways: viewing them in a web browser or mobile device, or as an email in their in-box.

Power BI - developers

[Embedding analytics, Customer Visuals and Automation]

Read in detail here

Power BI vs Tableau

Overall, the choice between Tableau and Power BI is a contentious one. Because the products are so similar, a majority of decisions will be made on the following factors:

Deal Breaker #1: Cost

No way around it. If you have a small budget (less than $30/user/month), Power BI is the product you’re going to end up with. And there’s no shame in that: Power BI is an adequate data visualization tool. If you’re ready to invest in Business Intelligence, and you have a team ready to take advantage of a souped-up BI system, Tableau could be the front-runner, or at least a strong consideration.

Deal Breaker #2: Licensing

No way around this one, either. If you want to pay up-front, and don’t want to rent the software monthly: you must purchase Tableau.

Deal Breaker #3: Functionality

For the foreseeable future, anyone who has users that will spend more than an hour or two per day using their BI tool might want to go with Tableau. Its range of visualizations are still unparalleled. If you need the bells and whistles – go with Tableau. Read More