This morning, James Phillips, General Manager for Data Experiences announced important changes to the Power BI service at the Microsoft Official Blog.

These exciting news include a free Power BI offering, price reductions and exciting new features and tools such as the Power BI Designer and iOS mobile apps.

To learn more, read the full announcement here. 

I tried it.   I’m not sure I understand how this is is “free”.   I tried going through this, and the only way I could get validated is I log in with my Office365 account.   So if I don’t have that, then I can’t use this service for free, right?   And Office365 isn’t free.  Not everyone will have that.   It’s not free like outlook.com or gmail.com is “free”.   Right?  Or am I missing something.

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Hi Kenneth,

The service we are referring to in this article is not Power BI for Office 365. The new service can be found here: http://powerbi.com/dashboards and it’s on preview for now, but it is free and if you don’t have access to Excel 2013, you can still connect to data and author reports using the Power BI designer or directly in your browser. On top of that, you can use the iPad app to consume your dashboards and reports.

Hi Kenneth also a more direct link to pricing and freatures included.

powerbi.com/…/pricing

The press release mentions new data connections will be released in the coming months – including from “Intuit.”  Does this refer to QuickBooks Online and/or Desktop?

Very cool stuff, impressed at the tempo of progress, great work.

However, I have some confusion from this announcement & the associated blog.  Are there now 2 PowerBI products going forward?  PowerBi for Office 365 -and- PowerBI Dashboard?  

The PowerBI for Office 365 has great visuals, love the predictive feature of charts – but no iPad app which is a show-stopper for us.  Will it get one?

The PowerBI Dashboard Preview has a better UI and an iPad app, but is it separate from Office 365’s ecosystem?  It appears to be far off in terms of production-ready..

-Eric.

I second Eric’s question. Trying to understand is this separate from Office 365? And will Excel 2013 desktop have similar updates on a regular basis or is either the PowerBI service (or Officce 365 PowerBI) the tool Microsoft is encouraging us to use; with desktop Excel 2013 always being a few steps behind?

When the preview will be available to non-US customers? I’m eager to sell the solution, but it’s very difficult without more information about the roadmap.