In a posting Monday on The Official Microsoft Blog, Corporate Vice President Quentin Clark noted that "business intelligence is only used by a fraction of the people that could derive value from it." He said that what is needed is "modernized business intelligence" to provide the information and insights needed for one's job or personal life.
Clark urged the reader to imagine bringing together information from a Net search and expert sources in order to discover new relationships. "And imagine that available on any scale of data and any kinds of computation you might need," as well as available to anyone, he wrote. The key functions of Power BI being promoted by Microsoft include discovering and combining data, modeling, visualization, asking questions of the data, sharing/collaborating and anywhere access.
To Microsoft, Power BI represents this kind of vision, providing what Clark described as "a public and corporate catalog of data sets and BI models, a way to search for data, a modern app and a Web-first experience."
Power BI includes a feature called Q&A, which accepts search terms and then delivers visual results such as interactive charts or graphs. When an Excel workbook has been uploaded to Power BI, it can be queried using natural language search.
There's also Power Query in Excel, enabling data to be searched and accessed from within an organization or from public sources. The feature can generate a single-screen Power View dashboard, which can then be...