Microsoft Power BI Desktop

Microsoft’s cloud-based business analytics tool, Power BI, came out with a brand new addition in late July 2015, Power BI Desktop. Officially named Power BI Designer, this free desktop tool aims business analysts and can be used to analyze data in a wide range of data sources. Power BI is also capable of ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) and can cleanse, transform and model interrelationships between the data; explore the resulting mashed up datasets.

Microsoft Power BI Desktop can create interactive reports and dashboards with simple drag and drops and these reports can then be published to the Power BI service for use by end users.

As Microsoft announced earlier in 2015, users will be able to choose between two versions of Power BI – a free service and a paid one (Power BI Pro), which comes with additional features and data capacity, costing US$9.99 per user per month.

Microsoft indeed has a very powerful platform offering for business intelligence but it has been relatively weak in presentation layer of BI. The new Power BI Desktop, which also first time in Microsoft's BI journey freed presentation from MS Excel, may well change that. Power BI online services are also quite easy to use. You can setup an account with your work email and immediately enjoy free services. Paid service as seen above is also not expensive and only comes at US$9.99 per user per month.

Currently the platform is only on cloud and no option to install it in-house. This will definitely prevent a lot of companies to seriously adapt it but its free entry price, ease of use and minimum setup requirements, it will probably be a very powerful cloud based self-service BI platform.

You can watch a 3 minutes Getting Started with the Power BI Desktop below.