Installing Power BI Designer Preview Experience

Today Microsoft announced the new Power BI features including the new Power BI Designer tool that provides a separate downloadable standalone application that can be used for Power BI features such as Power Query and Power View!  This is completely separate from Excel – now users can connect to data, relate data, create reports, and also import them to Power BI dashboards to share!

So in this example I was able to connect to an existing Excel file I had with some preloaded data (Customer and Geography tables), relate the data (queries) together, create a report (as you can see there are new visualizations available such as treemap, gauge, filled map, funnel, combo chart, etc.), and save the file locally (pibx file extension).

Now that I have a Power BI file with a report I can go to the Power BI Dashboard site and upload this file to share the content.

Once you get the report loaded you can then continue your design experience, pin items to a dashboard, and share (within your own organization for now)!  All of this is done in HTML5, so no worries about Silverlight.

Quite a few of the new visualizations are not supported to be pinned yet, but at some point they will, so hold on.

Very cool, a whole new user and sharing experience!

There is also a ton of great help and support documentation, videos, and walkthroughs available as well

Enjoy and thanks to the Power BI team!