Microsoft is going to release the new Power BI service on Friday, July 24th. The number of new features is huge, but remember that this is just the beginning of a new wave of continuous updates, similarly to what we have seen for Power Query in the last months, just at a larger scale.
I will cover in this blog some more details about the impact of Power BI on many different point of views. In the meantime, I collected a few useful links to get some more anticipations of what is coming:
- Announcing Power BI general availability coming July 24th (Microsoft Power BI blog)
- Power BI GA, D3js Data Viz, Apache Spark and So Much More (Jen Underwood blog)
- Power BI Desktop as a client tool for SSAS Tabular (Chris Webb blog)
The title of this blog post is dedicated to Power BI Desktop, because I think we are going to see a first version of a complete environment to design data models, etl, and visualizations, completely detached from Excel. It will be also free, but I am more interested to the features that will be available. Having a distribution unrelated to Office will help those environments where Office update requires years...
As a side note, this is a very important news for Corporate BI: Public Preview of Azure Data Catalog, still a young service but very promising.
Waiting for more news at the end of this week...