Power BI Components

Power BI is a business intelligence and data mining software suite which is a collection of different kinds of services by Microsoft. These services play a specific role and work in coordination with each other, to make Power BI function as a whole. In this section of the Power BI tutorial, we will learn about each of these Power BI services or components and their roles.

  • Power Query: We use this service to access, search and transform data from public or local/internal data sources.

  • Power Pivot: This service provides tools to model data taken from the in-memory data source to use it for analytics.

  • Power View: This service has many tools to graphically represent data using visuals and use them for analysis.

  • Power Map: It comes with tools and capabilities to visualize Geo-spatial data or information in the 3D model in a map. You can use these maps in a Power BI report.

  • Power BI Desktop: It is a companion development tool for Power View, Power Query, and Power Pivot. You can import data from a data source, prepare and transform it and use it in visualizations to create reports in Power BI Desktop.

  • Power BI Website: It is a web platform to view and share Power BI apps or solutions. Using Power BI Website, you can create dashboards from reports, share the dashboards with other Power BI users and slice and dice data within a report.

  • Power Service: The Power Service enables the sharing of workbooks and data views with other users. The data gets refreshed at regular intervals from the on-premises or/and cloud-based data sources.

  • Power Q&A: Using the Power Q&A option, you can search for your data or discover insights by entering queries in natural language. It instantly understands your query and returns relevant results.

  • Power BI Mobile apps: Business users view and interact with the reports and dashboards published on a cloud service through mobile hosted Power BI instances. Android, Windows and iOS mobile devices support the Power BI mobile apps.

  • Data Catalog: The Data Catalog option offers the capability to search and reuse queries.

  • Data Management Gateway: This component manages the periodic data refreshes, data feed viewing and table exposing.