{"id":2243,"date":"2013-07-08T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-08T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/dataplatforminsider\/2013\/07\/08\/introducing-power-bi-for-office-365\/"},"modified":"2024-01-22T22:49:14","modified_gmt":"2024-01-23T06:49:14","slug":"introducing-power-bi-for-office-365","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/sql-server\/blog\/2013\/07\/08\/introducing-power-bi-for-office-365\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Power BI for Office 365"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today we are pleased to announce a new offering that builds on our cloud-first data platform — Power BI for Office 365.<\/b> Unveiled this morning by Satya Nadella, President of the Server and Tools Business, during his keynote at our annual <\/span>Worldwide Partner Conference<\/span><\/a>, Power BI for Office 365 is a new self-service business intelligence (BI) solution delivered through Excel and Office 365 which provides information workers with data analysis and visualization capabilities to identify deeper business insights from their on-premises and cloud data. <\/span><\/p>\n

Businesses today are feeling the impact of some important trends that are converging in the enterprise: the growth of cloud services, a marked increase in data volume and processing needs, and employee demand for more simplified, intuitive connections with that data. In response to these trends, we\u2019ve created Power BI for Office 365, a solution which dramatically reduces the barriers for businesses of all sizes to use and deploy self-service BI tools.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bringing Big Data to a billion users<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

Power BI for Office 365 brings self-service BI solutions to everyday business users through the familiar tool they already use \u2013 Excel. By betting on Excel, we can bring the power of big data insights to the people who are closest to the business \u2013 not a specialist with an expensive, specialized tool — but everyone<\/span><\/i> in the organization can find deeper insights that will help them make better decisions. By delivering this service from Office 365, we can reach thousands of organizations who already trust Microsoft as a cloud service provider \u2013 one in four of our enterprise customers now has Office 365 \u2013 with a cloud service that deploys in minutes.<\/span><\/p>\n

A few years ago we delivered powerful data modeling and visualization capabilities with Power Pivot and Power View. These tools can create flexible models, process hundreds of millions of rows of data in split second times, and help business users discover and share new insights with colleagues through interactive charts and graphs. To complement these existing Excel capabilities we\u2019re introducing Power Query (formerly Project codename \u201cData Explorer<\/a>\u201d) and Power Map (formerly Project codename \u201cGeoFlow\u201d<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Power Query helps customers easily discover, access, and combine their data while Power Map allows users to create rich 3D geospatial visualizations in Excel. This comprehensive set of capabilities in Excel gives the over one billion Office users<\/b> the ability to do more with their data<\/b> through quick, easy-to-use, familiar tools. Business users can now search for new data sets both inside and outside their company that can be combined and analyzed within Excel. These new tools not only make it easy to connect to traditional structured data, but also allows business users to easily connect to a Hadoop cluster in a company\u2019s data center or to Windows Azure HDInsight<\/a> in the cloud.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Power<\/a><\/p>\n

Power Map <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Combining the familiarity of self-service BI capabilities in Excel with the ability to host interactive workbooks and data views in Office 365, Power BI for Office 365 includes critical functionality that enables customers to easily connect to their data inside and outside their organizations. Additionally, customers can share updates with their colleagues in real time and on mobile devices, interact with their data in new ways to gain faster insights and manage their work more effectively. New capabilities include:<\/span><\/p>\n