Microsoft on Monday announced that Power BI for Office 365, a cloud-based business intelligence service that allows people to work with data in Excel and Office 365, is now available. Power BI for Office 365 brings together Microsoft?s features in cloud to enable people to analyze and visualize data in Excel, discover insights, and share and collaborate on those insights from anywhere with Office 365.

Power BI for Office 365 with Excel includes data modeling and visualization capabilities and supports 3D geospatial visualizations in Excel.

With Office 365, users have access to cloud-based capabilities to share visualizations and reports with their colleagues in real time and on mobile devices. These key cloud-based capabilities include:

- A Data Management Gateway which enables IT to build connections to on-premise data sources and schedule refreshes. Business users always have the most up to date reports, whether on their desktop or over their device.

- BI Sites, dedicated workspaces optimized for BI projects, which allow business users to find and share data and reports with colleagues and collaborate over BI results.

- Real-time access to BI Sites and data no matter where a user is located via mobile devices. Users can access their data through the browser in HTML5 or through touch-optimized mobile application, available on the Windows Store.

- A natural language query experienced called Q&A which allows users to ask questions of their data and receive immediate answers in the form of an interactive table, chart or graph.

Power BI for office is available now. For more information and a trial download, visit www.powerbi.com.