Excel’s newest BI components (1:17), Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map, work in unison with the Power BI Sites cloud collaboration service. Once you have uploaded a workbook there (6:05) you can use any device that supports HTML5 to display your interactive BI visualisations and reports (8:08). While sharing could also be done without the cloud, by using an on-premise SharePoint server farm, Power BI gives you something extra special: the Q&A feature.

With Power BI Q&A you can query the data contained in all of your uploaded workbooks by asking normal, natural-language questions (10:08), like What is our pipeline revenue? or Show our profits vs operating expenses, by month. While it seems almost magical, you can greatly influence its operation by consciously using Power Pivot data models, and the remaining components of Power BI. Learn about it all in the next module, Introducing Microsoft Power BI.