What can Microsoft Power BI do?

Microsoft BI is a Business Intelligence tool which lets you create all sorts of visualization, allows data modeling by connecting various data sources through different relationships (cardinality), it also has an option of get data from where a user can get the data from distinct Microsoft products like Microsoft Azure, Dataflows, flat files into Power BI. Apart from this, it lets you create insightful reports and dashboards which can have tiles (visualization) from different data sources. It also supports M language (power query) and DAX languages which does advanced calculations like filtering and manipulation over the data. Microsoft Power BI has powerful security features (like row level security which makes the data accessible to only certain users depending on factors like there location, designation etc).

Power BI has an excellent query engine with Power Query that provides a great way to transform, mine, aggregate, and perform analyses that would typically be done in SQL on a database. The advantage with Power BI is that you can use a wider variety of file types and data sources, then easily and quickly make interactive visualizations of your data. Once you get over the initial learning curve and enable Python/R scripting, Power BI becomes a great alternative to Jupyter Notebooks or R Markdown for data storytelling and sharing.