There are many ways to describe Power BI, but one that I find to be both succinct and accurate is to say that it is a collection of software services, connectors, and apps that allow businesses and individuals to gather various unrelated data from various sources, manage it, and analyse it to create visually immersive, coherent, and highly interactive insights.
Power BI's user interface is strong and simple, making it a powerful business intelligence tool that enables users to easily aggregate real-time data from an expanding range of On-Premises, Cloud-based, Salesforce, Excel spreadsheets, and SQL Server databases.
With the use of Power BI, organizations can connect to data sources, clean the data, analyze the data, visualize the data, and gain insights from the data. Sharing final reports with reporting end users is also made simple.
The following Microsoft products make up Power BI: Power BI Desktop, a Windows desktop tool; Power BI Service; Power BI Mobile; Power BI Paginated Reports Builder; and Power BI Mobile.
Each of these Power BI components will be briefly explored in the sections that follow, but let's first find out more about the background of this effective business analytics tool.