Power BI

Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence platform, part of the Power Platform. It combines a desktop authoring tool (Power BI Desktop), a SaaS service for sharing and refreshing reports, and embedded analytics inside other apps. Power BI connects to hundreds of data sources, models data with the DAX language, and renders interactive dashboards and paginated reports. Dynamics 365 ships pre-built Power BI apps for finance, sales, service, and supply chain, and deeper analytics is enabled through Microsoft Fabric and direct Dataverse/F&O data lake links. It is licensed per user (Pro, Premium per user) or per capacity.

In practice, most Dynamics 365 deployments start with the pre-built Power BI apps that ship with each product — a finance team gets a working set of dashboards on day one without building a data model from scratch. Where teams outgrow those apps is almost always the same pattern: the pre-built model doesn't include a custom field or a custom entity the business added, so someone eventually builds a proper semantic model on top of Dataverse or F&O's own data export rather than the shipped app, at which point Power BI functions as a genuine self-service BI platform rather than a bundled dashboard.

Where confusion shows up: a Power BI Pro licence lets a user author and share reports within an organisation, but viewing a report someone else built and shared doesn't always require the viewer to hold a Pro licence themselves — Premium capacity licensing changes who needs what, and getting this wrong is a common source of "why can't this user see the dashboard" tickets. The DAX modelling language, not the visual designer, is also where most report performance problems actually originate — a badly designed measure can make an otherwise well-built report slow regardless of how clean the visuals look.