Doing BI in the cloud using PowerBI for Office 365

Early last year Microsoft announced the general availability (GA) of PowerBI for Office 365. Office is the most used office program and PowerBI brings in great value by providing a self-service means to discover, analyze and visualize data leading to deep insights.

Using PowerBI for Office 365 one can easily deploy a cloud-based BI application for sharing insights; colloborating and accessing reports from practically anywhere.

Power BI for Office includes the following Microsoft
'Power' tools:

• Power Query, enabling customers to easily search and access public data and their organization’s data, all within Excel (formerly known as “Data Explorer“).
• Power Map, a 3D data visualization tool for mapping, exploring and interacting with geographic and temporal data (formerly known as product codename “Geoflow“).
• Power Pivot for creating and customizing flexible data models within Excel.
• Power View for creating interactive charts, graphs and other visual representations of data.

What are the main capabilities?

PowerBI allows the companies to include the cloud as an arena in which they can share and colloborate. The DataCatalog; Q & A with natural language support; mobile connectivity are unbeatable capabilities.

• Quickly create collaborative BI sites – enable anyone to quickly create a collaborative BI site to share workbooks containing data and insights.
• Keep reports up to date with scheduled data refresh – reports that have been saved to the cloud can now connect back to on-premises data sources to refresh the data and stay up to date.
• Manage data queries for the team – share not only workbooks but also the data queries created in Power Query for Excel. Team members can now build and manage data queries for others to use when creating their own reports.
• Maintain a Data Catalog of searchable data – IT departments can now use the Data Catalog feature to make it easier for everyone to find and connect to corporate data by searching for it from within Excel.
• Ask questions of your data in natural language – with the Q&A features people can type questions they have of the data in natural language and the system will interpret the question and present answers in the form of interactive visualizations.
• Stay connected with mobile access to your reports – stay connected from anywhere with new HTML5 support and the Power BI windows app.

How much does it cost?

First of all you should be Office 365 Enterprise E3 or E4 customers and it was promotional $20 per month per user for the existing customers. Access this link here for reduced new prices.

However you could sign-up for a free-trial of PowerBi for Office 365 here and you will also get a 30day trial of Office 365 Pro-plus.

I do not have the Enterprise edition but just a $10 month subscription and I get only 'Power Map' add-in in my Office 365's Excel application.I have not figured it out how I may be able to use this without the other tools.

Note: Text in italic taken directly from Microsoft sites.