Power BI Interactive Demo
Explore a demo of Power BI, Microsoft's business intelligence platform for connecting to data sources, building interactive reports, and sharing dashboards across your organization.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence and data visualization platform, first released in 2013. It lets analysts and business users connect to hundreds of data sources, transform raw data using Power Query, build reports with drag-and-drop visuals, and publish dashboards that update automatically as underlying data changes. Most organizations use it to replace static spreadsheet reports with live, interactive views of operational and financial data.
The platform has three main components that work together. Power BI Desktop is a free Windows application where you build data models and reports. Power BI Service is the cloud-hosted layer where you publish, share, and collaborate on those reports. Power BI Mobile provides access to dashboards on iOS and Android. DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is the formula language used to write calculated columns and measures, and it's where most of the real analytical depth lives once you get past basic visuals.
Licensing comes in a few tiers. Power BI Desktop and the free tier of Power BI Service are free. Power BI Pro is $10/user/month and is required for sharing reports with other people in your organization. Power BI Premium covers larger deployments and unlocks paginated reports, larger dataset limits, and the ability to share with users who don't have a Pro license.
How to get started with Power BI
- 1
Download Power BI Desktop
Get Power BI Desktop free from microsoft.com or the Microsoft Store. It only runs on Windows. Mac users typically run it through a virtual machine or use the web version of Power BI Service for lighter work.
- 2
Connect to your data
Use Get Data to connect to your source, whether that's an Excel file, a SQL database, SharePoint, Salesforce, or one of the 100+ built-in connectors. Power Query opens automatically and lets you preview and clean the data before loading it into your model.
- 3
Build your data model
If you're connecting multiple tables, define relationships between them in the Model view. Getting the relationships right at this stage saves a lot of troubleshooting later. Add calculated columns or measures using DAX if your analysis requires logic beyond what the raw data provides.
- 4
Create your report pages
Drag fields onto the report canvas and select a visual type. Bar charts, line charts, cards, maps, and matrix tables cover most use cases. Slicers let viewers filter the whole page by date, region, or any other dimension you choose to expose.
- 5
Publish and share
Publish the report to Power BI Service from the Desktop ribbon. From there you can share it with colleagues, pin visuals to a dashboard, set up scheduled refresh, and embed the report in Teams or SharePoint. Pro licenses are required for the people you're sharing with.
Who is Power BI most useful for?
Finance and operations teams that need regular reports on KPIs without relying on a developer to refresh a spreadsheet every week. Power BI's scheduled refresh means the report your CFO looks at on Monday morning is already current. The fit is clearest when there's a defined set of metrics that people need to check on a recurring basis.
Data analysts at mid-size to enterprise companies who need to combine data from multiple systems. Connecting a SQL database, a Salesforce export, and a finance ERP into one model is the kind of work where Power BI earns its place. The data modeling layer is more capable than what most BI tools offer at similar price points, and if your team already uses Microsoft 365, the integration with Teams, SharePoint, and Excel reduces friction considerably.
Business users who want to explore data without writing SQL. Power Query handles most data preparation through a visual interface, and the report canvas lets non-technical users slice and filter their own views once a report is published. Teams adopting Power BI for the first time often find that building a shared walkthrough of how a report is structured helps with internal adoption, which is something Supademo handles well if you want an interactive guide to embed in a Teams channel or SharePoint page.
A few tools come up regularly when teams are evaluating Power BI or looking for something that fits their workflow better.
Preferred by data analysts who need more flexibility in how they explore and visualize data. Stronger for ad hoc analysis and custom chart types. Licensing is significantly more expensive than Power BI Pro.
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Already familiar to most business users and handles a wide range of analysis tasks without any additional tooling. Power Pivot and Power Query in Excel share the same engine as Power BI, so skills transfer. The limitation is scale, collaboration, and live refresh.
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Free to use and integrates natively with Google Analytics, BigQuery, Google Sheets, and the rest of the Google Workspace ecosystem. Good for marketing and web analytics dashboards. Less capable as a data modeling environment than Power BI.
Open-source option that non-technical users can run queries on without SQL. Easier to self-host than most BI tools and well-suited for startups or engineering teams that want a lightweight internal analytics layer without enterprise licensing costs.
FAQs on Power BI
Commonly asked questions about Power BI. Have more? Reach out and our team will be happy to help.
Is Power BI free?
Power BI Desktop is free to download and use for building reports. Power BI Service has a free tier with limitations on sharing. To share reports with colleagues, both you and the recipient need a Power BI Pro license at $10/user/month. Power BI Premium is priced differently and allows sharing with unlicensed users within a capacity.
What is DAX in Power BI?
DAX stands for Data Analysis Expressions. It's the formula language used in Power BI (and Excel's Power Pivot) to write calculated columns and measures. Basic reports don't require much DAX, but as soon as you need time intelligence calculations, complex aggregations, or conditional logic in your metrics, you'll be writing it regularly. The learning curve is real but manageable if you're already comfortable with Excel formulas.
How does Power BI compare to Tableau?
Tableau is generally preferred for exploratory analysis and has a more visual, drag-and-drop experience that analysts tend to find more flexible for ad hoc work. Power BI is typically more cost-effective, integrates more naturally into Microsoft environments, and has a stronger data modeling layer through DAX. For organizations already on Microsoft 365, Power BI is usually the default choice.
Can Power BI connect to Google Sheets or Excel?
Power BI connects to Excel files stored locally or in OneDrive and SharePoint. Connecting to Google Sheets requires a bit more work, usually going through a connector or exporting data first, though third-party connectors exist. For most Microsoft-shop organizations, the native Excel and SharePoint connections are sufficient.
What's the difference between a report and a dashboard in Power BI?
Reports in Power BI are multi-page documents built in Desktop, where each page contains visuals tied to a data model. Dashboards are single-page canvases in Power BI Service where you pin individual visuals from one or more reports. Dashboards are good for high-level monitoring; reports are where the detailed analysis and filtering happens.
Can Power BI refresh data automatically?
Scheduled refresh is available in Power BI Service. With a Pro or Premium license, you can set datasets to refresh up to 8 times per day (more with Premium). The data source needs to be accessible from the cloud, which sometimes requires installing an on-premises data gateway for local databases or internal systems.