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 Get started with Power BI - documentation

 Overview
o What is Power BI?
 o What is Power BI Desktop?
o What is the Power BI service?
o Comparing Power BI Desktop and the service
 Tutorials
o Get started with Power BI Desktop
o Get started with the Power BI service
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o The new Format pane
o Understand the Power BI service
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Comparing Power BI Desktop and the

Power BI service
 Article
 11/02/2021
 3 minutes to read


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Power BI Desktop is an application that you download and install for free on your local
computer. Desktop is a complete data analysis and report creation tool that is used to
connect to, transform, visualize, and analyze your data. It includes the Query Editor, in
which you can connect to many different sources of data, and combine them (often
called modeling) into a data model. Then you design a report based on that data model.
Reports can be shared with others directly or by publishing to the Power BI service.
The Power BI Desktop getting started guide walks through the process.

The Power BI service is a cloud-based service, or software as a service (SaaS). It

supports report editing and collaboration for teams and organizations. You can connect
to data sources in the Power BI service, too, but modeling is limited. The Power BI
service is used to do things such as creating dashboards, creating and sharing apps,
analyzing and exploring your data to uncover business insights, and much more. What is
the Power BI service details many of the capabilities of the Power BI service.
Most Power BI report designers who work on business intelligence projects use Power
BI Desktop to create Power BI reports, and then use the Power BI service to
collaborate and distribute their reports.

The Power BI service also hosts paginated reports in workspaces backed by a Power BI

Premium capacity. You create paginated reports with Power BI Report Builder.
See Compare Power BI reports and paginated reports in the article "What are paginated
reports in Power BI Premium?" for more information.

In a Venn diagram comparing Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service, the area in
the middle shows some of the areas where the two overlap. Some tasks you can do in
either Power BI Desktop or the service. The two outer sides of the Venn diagram show
the features that are unique to either the Desktop application or to the Power BI service.

Editing Power BI reports

In both the application and the service, you build and edit Power BI reports. A report can
have one or many pages, with visuals and collections of visuals. Add bookmarks,
buttons, filters, and drillthrough, to enhance navigation in your reports.

The report editors in Power BI Desktop and in the service are similar. They're made up of
three sections:

1. The top nav panes, different in Power BI Desktop and the service
2. The report canvas
3. The Fields, Visualizations, and Filters panes

This video shows the report editor in Power BI Desktop.

 Note

This video might use earlier versions of Power BI Desktop or the Power BI service.

Working in the Power BI service

Collaborating
 After you've created your reports, you can save them to a workspace in the Power BI
service, where you and your colleagues collaborate. You build dashboards on top of
those reports. Then, you share those dashboards and reports with report consumers
inside and outside your organization. Your report consumers view them in the Power BI
service in a Reading view, not Editing view. They don't have access to all the features
available to report creators. You can also share your datasets and let others build their
own reports from them. Read more about collaborating in the Power BI service.

Self-service data prep with dataflows

Dataflows help organizations unify data from disparate sources and prepare it for
modeling. Analysts can easily create dataflows, using familiar, self-service tools. Analysts
use dataflows to ingest, transform, integrate, and enrich big data by defining data
source connections, ETL logic, refresh schedules, and more. Read more about self-
service data prep with dataflows.

Next steps
What is Power BI Desktop?

Create a report in the Power BI service

Basic concepts for report designers

More questions? Try the Power BI Community

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In this article
1. Editing Power BI reports
2. Working in the Power BI service
3. Next steps
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