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What is Power BI?

Power BI is Microsoft's tool for dashboards and data analysis. See what Power BI can do, what it costs (Free/Pro/Premium), and how it works with M365.

In short

Power BI is Microsoft's tool for business intelligence: It gathers data from your business systems (finance system, CRM, Excel sheets, databases) and turns them into interactive dashboards and reports that update themselves.

Where Excel is built for working with one spreadsheet at a time, Power BI is built to combine many data sources and share the result with the entire organisation in a single click. The tool consists of Power BI Desktop for building the reports, the cloud-based Power BI Service for sharing them, and mobile apps for viewing them on the go.

The licensing model spans a free version, Pro and Premium, and Pro is already included in certain Microsoft 365 subscriptions. For small and medium-sized businesses, Power BI is often the fastest route from gut feeling to data-driven decisions. MI Support IT helps Danish businesses get started with Power BI as part of the Microsoft Power Platform.

Back to the glossary

What is Power BI?

Power BI is Microsoft's platform for business intelligence: data analysis, dashboards and reporting. It pulls data from virtually any source (Excel, SQL databases, finance systems, CRM, web services), models them and presents them as interactive visualisations that can be shared with colleagues and refreshed automatically. Power BI is part of the Microsoft Power Platform together with Power Apps and Power Automate.

What can Power BI do?

In practice, businesses use Power BI to:

  • Gather data in one place: sales from CRM, revenue from the finance system, hours from the project tool, all in one combined view in a Power BI dashboard.
  • Automate reporting: the monthly report that used to take a day in Excel now refreshes itself every night.
  • See developments live: KPI dashboards on a big screen or mobile, with the ability to drill down into the numbers behind them.
  • Share securely: reports are shared via the Power BI Service with control over who sees what, all the way down to row level.

Power BI vs. Excel

Excel is still unbeatable for ad hoc calculations and quick hands-on analysis. But when the same spreadsheet is emailed around in seven versions, when data has to be pulled manually every month, or when several sources need to be combined, you have outgrown Excel. Power BI separates the data model from the presentation: Data is fetched automatically, the model is built once, and everyone sees the same, up-to-date truth. The two are not mutually exclusive: Power BI can use Excel as a data source, and many start exactly there.

What does Power BI cost (Free/Pro/Premium)?

  • Power BI Free: free of charge. You can build reports in Power BI Desktop and view content in certain Premium workspaces, but not share your own reports.
  • Power BI Pro: paid per user per month and provides full sharing and collaboration. Pro is included in Microsoft 365 E5.
  • Power BI Premium: per user (PPU) or per capacity, for larger data volumes, more frequent refreshes and advanced features.

Current prices are available from Microsoft. For most SMBs, Pro is the right starting point, and the business case often looks better than expected once the licences are viewed in the context of the rest of your Microsoft agreement.

Power BI and your M365 licences

If you already have Microsoft 365, the foundation is in place: Power BI signs in with the same accounts via Entra ID, respects your security policies and works directly with Teams, SharePoint and Excel. Before buying licences, it is worth reviewing what your current agreement already includes: E5 customers, for example, have Pro in the package.

How MI Support IT can help

MI Support IT helps Danish businesses with the entire journey: licensing advice, setup, data models and the first dashboards, as part of Microsoft Power Platform and your Microsoft 365 solution. Contact us if you would like to see your own numbers in a dashboard instead of in seven spreadsheets.

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