As of this very night (actually, some on Tuesday and some tonight), the NEW Power BI released. As a Business Intelligence guy, and especially as one that believes strongly in helping people to help themselves, this release is a HUGE deal for me. Over the past few years I have become a huge fan of Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View working in Excel. I barely got started with Power BI for Office 365. I was going to dig into it more when the news of the NEW Power BI came in and was follow by a preview. That clinched it for me.

I am ecstatic with the new direction of Power BI. While Power BI for Office 365 is still there for now, the future is definitely the new service at PowerBI.com and the associated applications and mobile apps. The decoupling of this great functionality from Office/Excel and from SQL Server just provides so much flexibility and plays beautifully into the Mobile First Cloud First push from CEO Satya Nadella. This new direction for Microsoft is just so exciting.

I strongly encourage you go head over to www.powerbi.com and sign up for a FREE (wait…FREE? yes FREE) account. Look for more content here in the future on Power BI. For now, I just want to share that it has arrived.

I do have to share something way fun. I think I may be the first person to actually tell a corporate vice president at Microsoft to go to bed on Twitter.

The response was fantastic, and about what I expected. 🙂

I just had to share that because it shows the passion that these folks have for what they do. We could go on about features that are not there and hem and haw, but at the end of the day, there are people working hard to provide a great experience. And I, for one, think they rocked it. To James Phillips, Jen Underwood, and so many more people who worked to make the new Power BI a reality, I say: