As part of the company's efforts to continuously provide the best tools to their consumers, Microsoft announced today the newest capabilities for their Power BI.
The Power BI is now equipped with a cloud-based analytics service targeting non-technical business users. This makes the it more enterprise-ready. The Power BI was revamped last year to make it more appealing and useful not only to the business rank and file but also to other consumers. The tool now has more intelligent data exploration capabilities and deeper integration with Excel.
During the first-ever Microsoft Data Insight Summit held in Bellevue, Washington, the company revealed that the new Power BI helps "facilitates the analysis and visualization of Big Data and 'ordinary' data, coming from sources such as Excel spreadsheets, on-premise data stores, Hadoop datasets, streaming data and cloud services."
With this tool, users now have the ability to pin directly from Excel. Executive James Phillips said in a Power BI blog post that with Power BI, "Insights can be taken directly from the Excel desktop to Power BI dashboards, which will keep tiles on the dashboard up to date to help track your important data."
The newest features of the Power BI is the results of the company's constant addressing of customer feedbacks and suggestions. Phillips said that the user community has helped shape the new product. ADTMag reported that the product's introduction of "more than 265 new features resulting from some 45,000 User Voice votes and other feedback."
However, this is not the end for the upgrades and development, Phillips assured the users. "The notion of data proliferation and its intersection with the cloud is really the first tenet of modern BI."
"Moving from data to insights that inform intelligent action is the second, referring to the ability to engage and interact with data in new, intuitive and natural ways," he added. "This deepens intelligent data exploration by redefining how we experience data and have access to intelligence without requiring deep technical knowledge, such as through speech and other intuitive and convenient methods."
