Although Microsoft has not yet given us an official roadmap for its Power BI offering, I believe it is not beyond the realm of reason to share some educated and uneducated guesses about where the Power BI Designer might fit in.

Philosophically speaking, I have heard two opinions about Microsoft creating a standalone tool that combined all Power BI aspects:

1. Data acquisition
2. Data transformation
3. Modeling
4. Visualizations
5. Sharing and collaboration (maybe???)

On one hand, some pundits state that this is an unwise decision because it devalues a very strong self-service BI message that Microsoft has very successfully relied on before – everybody uses Excel and, therefore, it makes perfect sense just to enhance Excel with additional BI capabilities.

On the other hand, some believe that bundling all plugins in Excel creates a confusing end-user experience, therefore, having everything integrated into one app may enable the team to create a more cohesive…