Microsoft Power BI: History, Owners, Features, Pricing, Uses and Alternatives (2026)

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence and data visualisation platform that helps users pull together data from various sources and use this to create interactive dashboards and share reports. Power BI can be used by many businesses, students, data analysts, and professionals to make sense of their complex data sets.

Whether you want to look at your sales performance, track your growth, keep track of your finances, or start a career in data analytics, Power BI will offer you tools to help you explore your data. An important aspect of modern business is having the right data to understand how a business is performing, see what trends there are, and make the best decisions possible. However, getting insight out of large quantities of data can be very time-consuming if using spreadsheets and doing this manually. This is where Power BI can be used.

This article shows you the features, tools, cost, process, uses, benefits, drawbacks, and alternatives to Power BI in 2026.

What is Microsoft Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence platform that lets you connect with your data, analyse it, and create interactive reports and dashboards. This helps you turn your raw data into visual insights to help you make decisions for your business.

It has been created by Microsoft and can connect to various data sources such as Excel spreadsheets, SQL databases, Cloud environments, and other business applications. With Power BI, you do not have to manually look at thousands of rows of data in your spreadsheet; instead, you can look at charts, graphs, tables, and interactive filters to easily understand your results. This makes Power BI ideal for business intelligence analysts, data analysts, financial professionals, marketing teams, managers, and any organisations that use data-driven decisions.

There are three main components to Power BI: Power BI Desktop – Create reports; Power BI Service – Publish and share; Power BI Mobile – View reports on compatible mobile devices. One of the main benefits of Power BI is the integration with the rest of the Microsoft suite, including Excel, Azure, and other business applications.

Key Features of Power BI

There are a number of key features within Power BI to help you prepare, analyse, and visualise your business data. Whether you are a beginner looking to create basic reports or an organisation that needs to keep track of complex analytical processes.

Interactive Data Visualisations

Within Power BI, you can make your raw data into visual reports. You can create charts, graphs, tables, maps, and other visualisations. You can create bar charts to compare your sales, line charts to track your monthly revenue, pie charts to show category breakdowns, and interactive filters to see certain time frames, products, regions, and departments. This will help you to see trends within your data.

Multiple Data Sources

Power BI can connect to multiple data sources such as Excel documents, SQL databases, Cloud environments, and other business applications. This means you can bring data from multiple sources together.

For example, your business can bring together sales data from Excel, customer data from your database and advertising data from your marketing platform to create one report.

Power Query

Power Query is a data preparation tool. This helps you to clean your data.

You can delete duplicates, change data types, rename columns, replace blanks, split columns, and merge data sets.

This helps you to clean up your data and reduce repetitive tasks.

DAX

Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) is a formula language that can be used to create calculations within Power BI.

You can create measures, calculated columns, and calculated tables to analyse your data. For example, you can calculate your total revenue with:

Total Revenue = SUM(Sales[Revenue])

You can also calculate your total profit with:

Total Profit = SUM(Sales[Profit])

This is particularly useful if your reports require dynamic calculations that depend on your filters.

Interactive Dashboards and Reports

Within Power BI, you can create reports with multiple visualisations. You can add filters, click on parts of your charts and look at related data. Within the Power BI Service, you can create dashboards to give you an overview of your key business metrics.

For example, your sales dashboard can show your total revenue, monthly growth, top-selling products, regional sales and sales targets.

AI Analytics

Power BI can be integrated with AI using the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem. Depending on your licences, setup, and availability, you can utilise AI analytics and Copilot. This can help you to explore your data, summarise your insights, and create reports.

However, always double-check that the results from the AI are accurate by checking the data.

Security

Power BI can be secured. For example, row-level security (RLS) can be added. This will mean that users can only see certain rows of data. For example, a company can set up its sales report so that each region manager only sees their region.

It is important to set this up correctly and test to ensure sensitive data is kept secure.

Share Reports

Within the Power BI Service, you can publish your reports. You can organise reports into workspaces and work with colleagues. Organisations can share their analytical reports with authorised users and use reports within compatible Microsoft applications. Depending on your licence and capacity, you will have the ability to share your reports.

Tools Available in Power BI

Power BI includes several components that support different stages of the data analysis process.

Tool	Main Purpose
Power BI Desktop	Create reports and data models
Power BI Service	Publish, share, and manage reports online
Power BI Mobile	View reports on mobile devices
Power Query	Clean and transform data
DAX	Create calculations and analytical measures
Power BI Report Builder	Create paginated reports
On-premises Data Gateway	Connect supported local data sources to cloud services
Power BI Embedded	Integrate Power BI analytics into applications
Power BI Copilot	Assist with supported analytical and reporting tasks

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How to Use Power BI

To begin building your first interactive report using a spreadsheet, follow the steps below.

Install Power BI Desktop

Step1: Go to the official Microsoft site and download Power BI Desktop.

This is only available on Windows. If you are on Mac OS, you will need to have a compatible Windows setup.

Step2: Import Data

Open Power BI Desktop and click Get Data.

Select your data source, such as an Excel workbook or CSV. Choose your file and select the table you want to import.

Step3: Open the Power Query Editor

Remove any unnecessary columns, change data types, remove duplicates, and clear any blanks.

Step4: Ensure your date column has a data type of Date and your revenue has a data type of either Number or Currency.

Step 5: Build your Data Model

Check your relationships.

If you have multiple tables, such as Sales, Products, and Customers, add the relationships. Having a well-designed data model will help avoid errors when calculating your data.

Build Measures with DAX

• Create measures for key metrics.
• Total Sales = SUM(Sales[Revenue])
• Total Quantity = SUM(Sales[Quantity])
• Total Profit = SUM(Sales[Profit])

This assumes you have a table called Sales with the column names shown above.

Step 6: Build Report: Insert visuals

Create a column chart to show sales per product, a line chart to show revenue per month, plus cards for total sales and profit.

Include slicers to allow users to filter by date, product, and region.

Step 7: Publish your Report

Once you have finished your report, if you have the correct account, you can publish it to the Power BI Service. From there, you can organise your report.

Note that you won’t automatically have it public. You will need to share it with the correct permissions.

Power BI Pricing Plans

Power BI offers a free option and paid licenses for users who need report sharing, collaboration, or advanced analytical capabilities.

Plan	Indicative Price	Main Features
Free	₹0	Create reports and analyze data for personal use
Power BI Pro	Around ₹1,165 per user/month	Publish, share, and collaborate on reports
Power BI Premium Per User	Around ₹1,995 per user/month	Pro features plus additional premium capabilities
Power BI Embedded	Variable	Embed analytics into applications
Microsoft Fabric Capacity	Variable	Organization-level capacity and analytics services

Power BI vs Competitors

Power BI competes with other business intelligence platforms that help organizations analyze data and create interactive reports.

Feature	Power BI	Tableau	Qlik Sense
Developer	Microsoft	Salesforce	Qlik
Primary Purpose	Business intelligence and reporting	Data visualization and analytics	Business intelligence and data exploration
Data Visualization	Strong	Strong	Strong
Data Transformation	Power Query	Tableau Prep and related tools	Data integration and transformation tools
Formula Language	DAX	Calculated fields and expressions	Set analysis and expression language
Microsoft Integration	Excellent	Available	Available
Free Learning Options	Power BI Desktop	Tableau Public	Options vary
Best For	Microsoft-focused businesses and analysts	Visualization-focused analytics	Associative data exploration

Coupon Codes and Discounts

Most of the time, there will be no discount codes available to reduce the price of the main Power BI application. Power BI Desktop can be used for free, with Microsoft offering licensing options for extra features.

Some ways that you can save money with Power BI:

• Power BI Desktop – You can freely create reports, data models, and analyse your data.
• Microsoft 365 E5 – If you have an eligible Microsoft 365 E5 subscription, then you will have access to Power BI Pro features.
• Students – Check if you have access to Power BI or Microsoft Fabric through your educational institution.
• Trials – Check what Microsoft is currently offering to see if you can get a trial for the required paid features.
• Licensing – If you’re a business, you can look at what licensing you would need depending on how many users are creating and viewing reports.

Before purchasing any subscriptions, always make sure that you are eligible for any discounts and what the current prices are.

Applications of Power BI

Power BI is used in many industries to analyse business performance, track operations, and make data-driven decisions.

Business analytics

Businesses use Power BI to track revenue, costs, sales performance, and profit.

Managers can create dashboards to view monthly growth, regional performance, customer trends, and business goals. This helps organisations identify opportunities and make better decisions.

Financial analysis

Finance professionals can use Power BI to analyse budgeting, cash flow, costs and financial performance.

For example, a finance dashboard can show you how much you are actually spending compared to your planned budget and highlight any areas where there are large variances in costs.

Marketing analytics

Marketing teams can use Power BI to track campaign performance, web traffic, leads, and conversion rates.

By pulling together data from various marketing sources, you can identify which campaigns are performing well.

Sales performance

Sales teams can use Power BI to track revenue, customer acquisition, product performance and personal sales goals.

Interactive reports can be created to compare sales performance between regions, products and time frames.

Human resources analytics

HR can analyse staff turnover, recruitment performance, attendance, and workforce. This can help organisations identify any issues they may be having with staffing and assess their recruitment strategies.

Pros and Cons

Power BI provides powerful reporting capabilities, but users should understand its limitations before choosing it for a project.

Pros	Cons
Free desktop application	Desktop application is designed for Windows
Interactive dashboards and reports	Advanced features may require paid licenses
Integrates well with Excel	DAX can be challenging for beginners
Supports multiple data sources	Complex data models require careful design
Power Query simplifies data cleaning	Large datasets can require performance optimization
Supports business intelligence workflows	Sharing permissions and licensing can be confusing
Provides data security features	Incorrect security configuration can expose sensitive data
Suitable for students and professionals	Some advanced features depend on organizational capacity

Performance and User Experience

Power BI provides a visual drag-and-drop interface for creating reports.

You can very easily start using Power BI with basic projects by importing an Excel file, selecting columns and creating charts. As your project gets more complicated, you can learn about Power Query, DAX, 

Relationships & Data Modelling.

Performance will depend on a few different factors such as:

• Removing unnecessary columns & rows.
• Correct data types are used.
• Creating a clear data model with meaningful relationships.
• Not using overly complicated DAX calculations.
• Using correct visualisations.
• Security for sensitive information.

Testing the performance of your reports.

Overall, Power BI is fairly easy to get started with; however, it takes time to create professional dashboards and data models.

Can Power BI run On A MacBook?

There isn’t a native macOS version of Power BI Desktop. However, you can still use Power BI Service through your browser. However, most reports would be created in Power BI Desktop. If you do require Power BI Desktop, then there are ways to find a compatible Windows environment. You should also check the system requirements for your specific Mac.

Who Should Use Power BI?

• Students: Students can learn data visualisation, data modelling and business intelligence by creating practical projects.
• Data Analysts: Data analysts can clean data, calculate metrics and present their findings.
• Business Analysts: Business analysts can track KPIs, find gaps in performance and make decisions based on the data.
• Finance: Finance teams can analyse budgets, costs, revenues & profitability.
• Marketing: Marketing teams can track campaign performance, customer acquisition & conversions.
• Sales Managers: Sales managers can track revenue, compare performance, and track targets.
• Business Owners: Small businesses can use dashboards to track sales, costs, stock & growth.
• Enterprise Teams: Enterprise teams can share reports and have consistent metrics across their business.

Is Power BI Worth Learning In 2026?

Yes! If you want to improve your skills around data analytics, reporting & business intelligence, then Power BI is a great option.

As a student looking to go into computer science or AI-related careers, Power BI can be used alongside your programming and machine learning knowledge. This will teach you how to clean data, analyse performance, and present your findings.

However, Power BI alone will not guarantee you a job. Using Power BI with SQL, Excel, statistics, data modelling and practical projects will make your skills more useful.

Conclusion

Power BI is a powerful business intelligence tool which can help you turn raw data into interactive reports and meaningful insights. It has many features such as data visualisation, data transformation, DAX calculations, dashboards, security features & reporting. Power BI is a great option for students and beginners due to the free desktop application. There are paid versions that allow you to share reports, collaborate, and perform more advanced analysis. It can be used throughout many areas of business, including analytics, finance, marketing, healthcare, education, sales & supply chain management. 

FAQs

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