Power BI

Three strengths

• Interactive dashboards. You connect to your data, build visuals and share the insights across your organisation. 1
• Over 100 data sources. Power BI Desktop reads databases, cloud services, files and web sources. 1
• Familiar to Excel users. A UK case study found that anyone comfortable with Excel pivot tables and charts could be a potential user, because the learning curve isn't steep. 3

What it is

Most businesses have the numbers somewhere; the hard part is seeing them. A dashboard is a single screen of charts and figures that updates as the data changes, so a manager can see how the business is going without asking someone to build a report. Power BI is Microsoft's business analytics platform for doing that: it helps you "turn data into actionable insights", and gives report builders and business users tools to connect, visualise and share data across an organisation. 1

It has two main parts. Power BI Desktop is where reports are built, with tools for cleaning data, modelling it and designing visuals. The Power BI service is where they're shared, with team workspaces, scheduled refreshes, alerts and security rules, including row-level security that limits what each person can see. A mobile app lets people view reports on the go. 1 For documents that need a fixed layout, such as invoices, it also makes printable paginated reports. 1

Microsoft announced in July 2015 that the new Power BI service would be generally available on 24 July, after more than 500,000 unique users from 45,000 companies across 185 countries helped shape it. 2 Today Power BI is a core component of Microsoft Fabric. Existing Power BI users need no migration: their content and workspaces stay the same. 1

Research on smaller organisations backs up the appeal. In a 2016 case study from Aston University, a UK small to medium-sized business that already ran SQL Server used Power BI for self-service reports. Managers could explore the data and create their own reports without relying on the IT department, which saved IT time, and the company saw tangible benefits within six months. 3 The authors chose it over other options mainly because it's fairly easy to use even for non-IT experts and works with Office 365. 3

We choose it because a dashboard that people can open and use themselves is what turns a data project into something the whole business benefits from.

How we use it

Power BI is the reporting layer we pair with Fabric when a client is Microsoft-based. We connect it to your data, shape it into a model, and build the dashboards and reports your team reads. Behind it sits Fabric, or for larger or more varied data, Databricks.

That's Data Solutions work, where reporting dashboards are one of the capabilities, and for you it means numbers you can read at a glance, built from your own data.

References

1. Microsoft, "What is Power BI?", Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/power-bi-overview (accessed 29 October 2026)
2. James Phillips, "Over 500,000 unique users from 45,000 companies across 185 countries helped shape the new Power BI", The Official Microsoft Blog, 10 July 2015. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/07/10/over-500000-unique-users-from-45000-companies-across-185-countries-helped-shape-the-new-power-bi/ (accessed 29 October 2026)
3. Raghavendra Raj, Shun Ha Sylvia Wong and Anthony J. Beaumont, "Business Intelligence Solution for an SME: A Case Study", Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2016), Volume 3: KMIS, pp. 41-50. https://www.scitepress.org/papers/2016/60495/60495.pdf (accessed 29 October 2026)