One year ago today on the 24th July 2015 a brand spanking new BI baby was born. And its proud parents named the new baby Power BI, and soon Power BI would become known to everyone around the world. Today is therefore a day to celebrate what a great first year it has been for this bambino.
From Little Things, Big Things Grow
It is no secret that I thought the baby was just a little bit ugly on its day of birth, but then again many babies are! However it didn’t take long for it to grow into something that would be a game changer for personal and enterprise business intelligence. For me it was late in October 2015 when Power BI hit the sweet spot of “good enough”, and that was the trigger for me to jump all in. The reality is that the product will grow faster and better as a live product than it could possibly ever grow if it was being developed in a backroom pending a release when it has every visualisation feature of some of the more mature products. It is only the fact that is is being used by so many early adopters, and the fact that Microsoft is taking their feedback on board, that this product is growing at such an incredible pace. However we must remember that the product is only a one year old; we can’t expect it to be as sharp and mature as its 30 year old favourite sibling Microsoft Excel.
Birthday Video (coming soon)
My Top 10 Things I Love About Power BI in its First Year
Here are my top 10 things that I love about Power BI at the sweet age of 1 year old.
- It’s free to get started.
- The integration and reuse of Power Pivot and Power Query across Power BI, Microsoft Excel and SSAS Tabular – all the same software – great job!!
- The Power BI Desktop application is a cracking piece of free software.
- The cloud service is effectively you own personal free SSAS Tabular server.
- The open source visuals gallery that allows the community to build new visualisations.
- Excel and Power BI are better together, including Pin Ranges to Dashboards, and Analyse in Excel.
- The innovative cross filter behaviour across visualisation (plus the ability now to control this by exception).
- Seamless integration with Mobile devices across Android, iOS and Windows Mobile
- So many data connectors to so many data sources.
- Q&A is showing so much promise.
Thanks a Million Microsoft
A big thanks a million to all the fabulous people at Microsoft on the Power BI team for doing such a great job over the last year this baby to make it such a precocious one year old. Keep up the good work.
For me the most lovable feature of any BI product is the ability to EXPORT to EXCEL, and Power BI is no exception. The celebration is all about the evolution of Excel to include PP, PQ and PBI.
When PowerPivot was first released by Microsoft as a FREE add in for Excel, I knew that the world for analysts had changed. As PowerQuery, PowerMap, DAX, M, Etc. were added to the FREE add in list. It became obvious that MS was building a new and incredible tool and it was all linked to my beloved Excel. When Excel 2013 and 2016 came out and you had to have ProPlus to get all of the goodies built in, I was deflated that MS was going to blowup a great idea. Then PowerBI came out as a free product!! Wow, I was elated and surprised. PowerBI is one of the most powerful products to be released in years and it is FREE. Thank you Microsoft!
I guess “free” is a development and penetration pricing strategy. Ultimately businesses need to make money from their investments, and I guess he investment here is significant.
Power BI: the birthday present is to us!
One other item to add to the list is the fantastic user community that is building up to support and grow with Power BI!
Lovely post. Not what you would immediately expect.
Guess your Top 10 list is not ranked !
No, not ranked, just liked.