Power BI in Office 365

Question

I am asked to work on a Dashboard project using Power BI. This will be implemented in Office 365 site. I was unable to find a properly explaining tutorial related to Power BI in office 356. I am having following confusions in Power BI for Office 365.

• What is the different between Power BI in Office 365 and MS Office Excel.?

• What is the connection betweer Power BI in Office 365 and MS Office Excel.?

• Can I create a Power BI report in Office 365 without my locally installed Office Excel?

• Is Q & A feature already included in Power BI or is it something else?

• Can a Power BI view included in a website component?

• What is the different between Excel Web services and Power BI?

• Would like know resources for examples of how to ?

Is the following idea correct?

Power BI has the same visualization power as Office Excel Application. We create Visualizations using Power BI in locally using Office Excel and then we upload it to Office 365 and we can Interact with the visualizations as the same in the web?

Is it that everything has to be done in the local Office Excel file noting has to be done in Office 365?

Even though there are data sources configuration for Power BI in Office 365. That is to create Odata?

Thanks in Advance :)

Answer 1

Power BI for Office 365 is retired

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-admin-o365portal-retired

Power BI desktop can be downloaded for free and can create data models from heterogeneous data-sources including Excel spread sheets. Power BI is using Excel features like Power Query, Power Pivot etc. Power BI dataset was formerly known as Power Pivot. Similarly Query Editor in Power BI was formerly known as Power Query.

There is a big difference in the delivery of reports and dashboards as well. Power BI is using Power BI service for this (need a sign-in) The deployments can be on cloud or on-premise, depends on the organisation preferences. There are features to create additional insights, Q & A features as well as security to view an share the report.

See the basic concepts

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-basic-concepts

Answer 2

I am also new to this technology and really cant answer all of your question but some I can

• Q & A feature is already included in the power bi.
• yes you have to prepare your dashboards in locally installed excel and publish them to the power bi site.
• You can achieve this by using both MS Office Excel and o365 Office Pro, this would provide you some new addins for power bi like synonyms.
• Yes a power bi view can be included in a website component as well, since it is Sharepoint o365 and a HTML or page can be easily embedded to it and a link component can be include into it to point which refers the power bi site.
• Now you can also use New Power BI Preview Designer for creating your dashboards.

Regards, Piyush

Answer 3

This help document should cover most of these questions: http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/power-bi-getting-started-guide-HA104103589.aspx

In short, Power BI for Excel contains the tools to build and create insights: Power Query to discover and mash up data Power Pivot to create a analytical model Power View to visualize

Power Bi for office 365 is for collaboration and consumption ofe the workbooks created in Excel.

Your assumptions are correct, only change is that for the data sources you can use that to refresh your on premise data.