Microsoft today announced the general availability of Power BI for Office 365, a cloud-based business intelligence service that gives people a powerful new way to work with data in the tools they use every day, Excel and Office 365.
With Excel, businesses can now discover, analyze, and visualize data like never before to find valuable business insights. With Power BI for Office 365 they can easily deploy a cloud-based BI environment where people can share insights, collaborate and access reports, from anywhere. With this release, Microsoft is delivering completely new experiences to customers. For example, Power Query in Excel enables easy search and access data within the organization or from publically available sources. In addition, once Excel workbooks are uploaded to Power BI, using natural language search questions can be asked and the responses are received instantly in the form of interactive charts or graphs.
Power BI for Office 365 provides an easy way for organizations to begin doing self-service business intelligence today. Office suite has its eye on the future and the features are aimed at catering to the productivity need in the dynamic world of services. With the data overload and continuing data explosion, the need of the hour is to make sense of it all. Power BI for Office 365 is a step in helping businesses make informed decisions through insights locked within their data.