Last night Microsoft announced the next version of Power BI , And it is exciting !!
For now it is only in preview mode, And only available for People with US Business email.
With The New Power BI you can upload or connect to your data, And create html5 mobile friendly visualizations
Getting Data
You can start a dashboard or a report by getting data from several cloud data source types like Sales Force, Zend Desk and Dynamics CRM, SSAS , or most important Excel workbook , And thus, Excel Workbooks with data model!
Power BI Designer
Another way to create dashboards and reports is with the new tool called Power BI desginer.
This tool is kind of a combination between Power Query and the basics of The data model,
So there is almost fully functional power query inside, And you can use relationships but not DAX.
The Power BI designer create pbid files which can be uploaded to the new Power BI
Reports
I loaded an Excel 2013 workbook containing a data model, Few Excel sheets with dashboards , and 2 Power View sheets.
The Excel sheets are not displayed here (at least i could not find it), But the Power View reports are there, That is , the html5 version of them.
But the most exciting thing is the ability to create new sheets (pages). You can drag and drop dimensions and measures (similar to the power view way)
And use a greater variety of visualizations (Gauges ! I hate them ! but my clients love them !!).
To my opinion the new pages are much better than power view, It is much cleaner, and looks great.
Each tile in the report pages can be pin to dashboards
Dashboards
Dashboard look the same as a report page, Only you cant really create new visualization in it,
It contains all the tiles you pinned to dashboards from the reports, And when you click it , It "Drills through" to the relevant screen , This is awesome !
On the top of the dashboard screen there is the Q&A (natural language) search line, You can also pin a question to dashboard
Refresh
So far there is no scheduled refresh option, But you can tell from the pricing page of the Power BI website , That it is planned
Pricing
Big news here ! The new power BI is going to have a free version and a paid version.
The paid version will have almost all features available today and more , And the price i 9.99$ ! a 75% discount from current price ! This is big
The free version will lack some features like collaboration and scheduled refresh to on-premise data sources
Mobile
Microsoft are definitely investing in mobile with A new iPad app which is already available, And iphone and Android underway
Conclusion
Power BI is here to stay, Microsoft takes a big step in the right direction.
We are waiting for Hebrew support !