Thoughts On The New Power BI

There’s been a lot of Power BI-related news in the last few days. I think it’s enough to say that there is a new Power BI in town, a very different (and much better) story from what we’ve had up to now. Sadly the preview is only available in the US at the moment.

I’m not going to repeat what the official announcements say, though, and you can read them here if you haven’t seen them already:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2014/12/16/announcing-new-excel-2013-bi-stability-and-usability-improvements.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2014/12/18/new-power-bi-features-available-for-preview.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbidev/archive/2014/12/02/introducing-the-power-bi-apis-for-preview.aspx

Here’s the main Power BI website:

http://www.powerbi.com/

Here’s the documentation for the APIs:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/powerbi

Here’s the YouTube channel with lots of videos:

https://www.youtube.com/user/mspowerbi

Here’s the help:

http://support.powerbi.com/knowledgebase

So what does all this mean for us, the Microsoft BI community?

Excel Updates

One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard from people who are just starting to test Power Pivot and Excel 2013 is that it just hasn’t been stable (even compared…