Like everyone else, I got the updated beta invite for Power BI today in my inbox.  I’ve been using PowerQuery in Excel 2013 for awhile already and am really liking it, so I thought I’d record my experiences setting up Power BI in Office 365.

There were a couple of tricky parts, such as making sure to assign the proper amount and types of licenses to the Office 365 users and in activating the gateway, but I did manage to get through the set up.

Unfortunately, although I was able to set up a Gateway and SQL Server Data source, I was not able to connect to my data source via Power Query.  This could be my own error as I ran through the steps quickly.  I’ll re-visit this over the next week or so.  Below are some screens showing parts of the process of setting up the connection to a data source via the gateway.

First setting the credentials.

Next setting up which parts of the data (in this case which tables and/or views) are part of the data source.

After updating my Power Query bits, I was able to create a query, share it to the organization and then to ‘see’ the query via the search capability in Power Query, when the query was scoped to the ‘Organization’.

Also, I didn’t have time to try out the natural language query capabilities and the query logging (overhead and usage) on the portal. I did quickly try out searching on some of the terms in my shared query and found that I did get a result when I searched on a column name in the query.

There are also a set of PowerBI features available on SharePoint 365, that I’ll be looking into over the next few weeks or so.

So far, I really like what I see and am looking forward to working more with this release.

Below is a short screencast of my experience trying out the bits today.