I’ve written a couple times before about my Power BI project at work. The head of our group gave a presentation at the Worldwide Partner Conference that provides a nice overview of our future roadmap. To view it, go the WPC keynote page, click on “The Cloud for Modern Business” and then skip ahead to the 21 minute mark when James Phillips comes on stage.
Power BI
My project at work is called Power Query for Excel. We released our first version last summer and now our second version is available as part of a larger offering called “Power BI for Office 365.” BI stands for Business Intelligence. The offering includes a bunch of tools that help you make sense of your data, create nice reports and then share them out with your colleagues. This marks the first time that something I’ve worked on at Microsoft is available for purchase!
But never fear home users, while the collaboration and sharing features require payment but you can use some of the pieces for free. For example, you can download the latest version of Power Query from the Microsoft download center.
It’s exciting to see all our hard work available for public use and we love getting feedback! Please use the smile/frown buttons on the Power Query tab in Excel or leave feedback in the Power Query forum (or one of the other Power BI component forums.)
The marketing department put together a nice Power BI overview video. The Power Query specific part is in the “Discover” section around the 36 second mark.