Fredrik Tunvall, Analyst, Software – Information Management, Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Information Management

Microsoft is betting heavily on the cloud for delivering self-service BI capabilities. Power BI builds on existing Microsoft Excel building blocks, including Power Query and Power View, to provide a single self-service client based on the familiar Excel spreadsheet as the user interface. It is a welcome simplification of Microsoft’s often confusing BI product stack that includes overlapping capabilities. The Power BI for Office 365 is priced competitively versus Tableau Online, the closest comparable product.

Making BI native to Excel

With many millions of users, Microsoft Excel is arguably the world’s most popular BI tool. With Power BI Microsoft sharpens its focus on the BI end user by leveraging the ubiquity of Excel, allowing users to load data, manage queries, visualize the answers, and manage connections to a variety of back-end data sources inside the …