Power Query has an add-in for Excel 2010 and Excel 2013, and it is embedded in Excel 2016. Power BI components can be used individually or in a combination.
![power bi power bi](https://www.zirous.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Power-BI-Premium3.png)
So if you’ve heard somewhere that Power BI is a basic self-service data analysis tool for business analysts and cannot be used for large enterprises systems, I have to say this is totally wrong! I’ve been using Power BI technology myself in many large enterprise scale systems and applications, and I’ve seen usage of that in many case studies all around the world. It is on the other hand so powerful with power query formula language (M) and data analysis expression (DAX) that every developer can write complex codes for data mash up and calculated measures to respond challenging requirements. Power BI built easy graphical user interfaces to follow, so a business user simply could user Power Query or Power BI desktop to mash up the data without writing even a single line of code. Some of them however are new and under frequent regular updates. Some of above components are strong and has been tested for very long time.
Power bi windows#
![power bi power bi](https://www.esri.com/content/dam/esrisites/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-for-powerbi/assets/powerbi-overview-banner-fg.png)
There are many other parts for Power BI as well, such as
![power bi power bi](https://msdynamicsworld.com/sites/default/files/powerbi-bi360-dashboard-1.png)
Power BI made of 6 main components, these components released in the market separately, and they can be used even individually. On the other hand Power BI is powerful and mature enough that can be used in enterprise systems by BI developers for complex data mash-up and modelling scenarios. Power BI is simple and user friendly enough that business analysts and power users can work with it and get benefits of it. Power BI is a cloud based data analysis, which can be used for reporting and data analysis from wide range of data source. There are many definitions for this tool, here is my version of it simplified for everyone to understand and believe me there are much more things that you can do with Power BI which you can’t do with other products easily. You can work with On-premises as well as Azure/cloud based data sources. You can publish your dashboard and visualization tool in cloud and share it to those who you want. You can visualize data with great range of data visualization elements and customize it to tell the story behind the data. You can model the data, build your star schema, or add measures and calculated columns with an In-Memory super fast engine. You can mash up the data as you want with a very powerful data mash up engine. With Power BI you can connect to many data sources (wide range of data sources supported, and more data sources add to the list every month). Power BI is combination of all of those, and it is much more. Microsoft team worked through long period of time to build a big umbrella called Power BI, this big umbrella is not just a visualization tool such as Tableau, it is not just a self-service data analysis tool such as PivotTable and PivotChart in Excel, it is not just a cloud based tool for data analysis.
![power bi power bi](https://www.manatec.de/web/image/81717/power_bi_400x400.png)
On the other hand Power Pivot released at 2010 for the first time. Some components such As Power BI Desktop is such new that released as general availability at 24th of July. Power BI is not a new name in the BI market, components of Power BI has been in the market through different time periods.
Power bi series#
As promised I started writing blog post series for the Online Book: Power BI from Rookie to Rockstar, and this is the first post.