Overview of Power BI 2021 release wave 1

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new in Power BI?. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Important

Some of the functionality described in this release plan has not been released. Delivery timelines may change and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy). Learn more: What's new and planned

Microsoft business intelligence simplifies how organizations derive insights from transactional and observational data. It helps organizations create a data culture where employees can make decisions based on facts, not opinions. We are investing in three key areas that drive a data culture: Amazing data experiences that empower every individual, BI integrated where we work empowering every team, and Modern enterprise BI empowering every organization.

Amazing data experiences

To build a data culture, every single individual needs to have instantly familiar experiences combined with AI infused insights. Whether that is authors creating reports using the free Power BI Desktop tool, consumers exploring data in the Power BI service or mobile applications, as well as users in Office using data to make better decisions, Power BI will continue to evolve to make it easier than ever to work with data. Power BI will continue to advance the state-of-the-art leveraging AI and ML to help everyone easily discover insights. To enable everyone in the organization to get insights wherever they are and in context, we developed the world leading mobile BI app and enabled embedding BI in your applications, websites, and portals. This empowers individuals across an organization to drive and grow the data culture.

Integrated where teams work

One area of innovation that customers value is the ability to weave BI deep into the fabric of where work happens. Customers value the ability to quickly move from insight to action to automation. The Microsoft Power Platform makes this uniquely possible through Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate. The products are designed to work together to make it easy for customers to adapt quickly to changing business requirements. Insights become more valuable as they are shared. By integrating Power BI deeply with Office 365 – Microsoft Teams, Excel, PowerPoint, and more, we bring insights to where everyone works and collaborates.

Modern Enterprise BI

Power BI can scale to meet the most demanding needs of large enterprise customers, which is why more and more customers are choosing to standardize on Power BI. Trust is foundational for customers to adopt a BI platform broadly. The Power BI team is committed to a fully open platform – at the data tier with Common Data Model support, at the semantic model tier with support for the industry standard XMLA protocol, and a completely open visualization stack. In addition, we have invested in Data Protection which helps protect data even when it is exported out of Power BI, as well as a comprehensive set of certifications to ensure that Power BI is fully compliant with regulations around the world. Enable your organization to create a global, governed, scalable, secure, and unified BI platform that meets the needs of both self-service and centralized BI. Power BI is a modern, compliant platform that serves as single destination for business analytics with key enterprise-facing updates on enterprise-grade semantic models, reporting, application lifecycle management, and data management at worldwide scale and performance. Power BI is designed to work with data wherever it lives – in the cloud or on-premises through 150+ connectors that ship out of the box and connectors that are added every month. And, when customers are building new BI, analytics, or data warehousing projects, we are making it radically easy with Azure Synapse Analytics. With built in capabilities for data ingestion, data preparation, machine learning, and visualization, Synapse accelerates time to value, reduces TCO, and provides incredible performance over large data volumes.

Updates to Power BI 2021 release wave 1