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What is Power BI?

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What is Power BI?

What Power BI is: Desktop, the Service, semantic models, licensing from Free to Fabric, how the pieces fit, and starting without a report swamp.

Solving Microsoft 365 · www.solvingmicrosoft365.com/guides/what-is-power-bi

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01

How it handles data

Power BI ships with hundreds of connectors — SQL Server, Snowflake, Databricks, Dataverse, SharePoint, Excel, Salesforce, Google BigQuery, and the rest. The architectural choice per model is the storage mode:

Solving Microsoft 365 · www.solvingmicrosoft365.com/guides/what-is-power-bi

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02

Licensing after Fabric

Power BI licensing confuses everyone because the same reports can be paid for four different ways:

Solving Microsoft 365 · www.solvingmicrosoft365.com/guides/what-is-power-bi

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03

Governance: the part everyone skips

Because anyone with Desktop can build a report, Power BI estates grow bottom-up. Left alone, that produces the report swamp: hundreds of workspaces, conflicting numbers in every meeting, refresh failures nobody owns, an…

Solving Microsoft 365 · www.solvingmicrosoft365.com/guides/what-is-power-bi

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04

Where it fits

Inside Microsoft 365, Power BI is the analytics surface: reports embed in Teams and SharePoint, security rides on Entra ID, labels come from Purview, and Copilot can generate report pages and DAX against your models. It…

Solving Microsoft 365 · www.solvingmicrosoft365.com/guides/what-is-power-bi

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