Microsoft announced today that the Power BI for Office 365 preview has been updated. One of my colleagues, Andrew Tegethoff, previously mentioned the compelling features in a previous post. The features were not all available in the preview at the time of the earlier posting. They have added natural language search with Q&A, as well as made several improvements to Power Map and Power Query.
From today’s announcement found here, on the Q&A feature
Search-driven data visualization with Q&A
One of the Power BI features users have been most interested in is Q&A, which takes enterprise data search and exploration to a whole new level. With Q&A, we looked at how consumers experienced Bing search and used that knowledge to enable customers to query their enterprise data and generate stunning visual results. The search experience is instantaneous and uses natural language query – Q&A interprets the question the user is asking and serves up the correct interactive chart or graph. We’ve received great responses from customers who have tested this capability and look forward to hearing what you think. To see Q&A in action, check out this video:
Bringing big data to a billion users
Power BI for Office 365 is just one way we are delivering on our vision to enable the broadest set of people to gain actionable insights from big data, at any time and from anywhere. With Power BI we are providing access to powerful business analytics tools, built into our existing products including Excel and Office 365 to make data analysis engaging and impactful.
To learn more and register for the preview visit www.powerbi.com. You can also download Power Map and Power Query along with sample datasets on the Power BI add-in Getting Started page. To see Power BI for Office 365 in action, check out this demonstration.
