What is Microsoft Power BI?

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. For more information about the full suite of Power BI tools, see What is Power BI?

Power BI License Types Available: 

There are two types of licenses currently available: Free and Pro. Premium licenses may be offered in the future. See Capabilities by License Type for more information.

Bradley University students, faculty and employees are provided an M365 school account license that can allow access to Power BI Desktop (free) through a web-based platform, but it requires a request be made to the IT Service desk so that an individual Power BI (Free) license may be assigned and activated on the user’s school account. Any student, faculty member or employee with an active M365 school account may make this request at any time through the IT Service Desk. 

Power BI Desktop by download:

Bradley University students, faculty and employees who use the Microsoft Windows Operating System may, at their discretion, follow these instructions to download Power BI Desktop (free) from the Microsoft website.  

Power BI Desktop (Free) via download will not run on Apple machines.

Power BI Pro extends the utility and power of Power BI Desktop. A Pro license allows for publishing and viewing (sharing without edit rights) of reports and dashboards to other Power BI licensed users (including the free version) via M365 Cloud.

Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) License: 

A Power BI Premium per User (PPU) license is targeted for use by advanced users who may have a collective need to collaborate using advanced analytics functions, but do not have a need to share their products (work) with anyone beyond their fellow advanced users. This situation is ideal for colleges with advanced studies programs, research teams with limited size and teams with a need for heavy-duty analytics needs but a smaller audience.

Power BI PPU license holders can: publish content to other workspaces, share dashboards (non-editable), subscribe to dashboards (non-editable) and reports (non-editable), share created content for collaboration with users who have a PPU license.

Offers all the bells and whistles of PPU plus the ability to publish content to shared workspaces for all licensed Power BI users to consume, regardless of the license type This enterprise-level license offers the highest level of functionality.