Microsoft Power BI is available for free to support analytics at Cornell. It is intuitive business intelligence software designed for data analysis and visualization. It features a drag-and-drop interface for building interactive reports and dashboards, with support for writing custom Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) and Structured Query Language (SQL) to explore complex data relationships. Users can choose from a wide range of visualizations. Reports are created using Power BI Desktop and shared via the Power BI Service.

Benefits

Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize, and discover what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want. Microsoft provides an overview of Power BI.

While Power BI has features similar to OAS and Tableau, it is more closely integrated with other Microsoft 365 products and services such as Teams, Copilot, and Office. In addition, among heavy Excel users, Power BI is often an effective choice since those users are already familiar with DAX.

Licensing

CIT's Enterprise Data Services (EDS) team administers and maintains the Microsoft Fabric environment, which includes Power BI. However, EDS does not manage Power BI licenses. Power BI Free or Pro versions can be requested from the Cornell Microsoft 365 team by completing the following form: 

Power BI License Request

Our Power BI Comparison Table has more information about the features of each version.

Power BI Workspaces

Power BI reports and datasets are published to workspaces. These workspaces reside in the Microsoft Power BI service within what Microsoft refers to as an individual capacity, which consists of a dedicated amount of storage and resources in the Microsoft Fabric environment. By default, workspaces that Power BI users create are located within a default capacity which contains only a limited amount of storage and resources which are not suitable for large-scale or enterprise use. It is not recommended that a default capacity is used for production or large-scale usage.

Alternatively, CIT's Enterprise Data Services (EDS) has available a large Microsoft Fabric (F64) capacity that can be used instead of the limited default capacity. A dedicated workspace within this EDS F64 capacity can be requested by completing the following form:

Power BI Workspace Request Form

Power BI Training

A list of training options for PowerBI development and administration, as well as Microsoft Fabric can be found here.

Questions

Microsoft updates the tool frequently. Support and information for getting started with Power BI is provided by Microsoft, not through the Cornell IT Service Desk.

Contact CIT's Analytics and Reporting team if you have questions.