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Power BI service basics

Use this article to learn key Power BI service concepts and terms—including workspaces, reports, dashboards, and semantic models. Understanding these concepts makes it easier to navigate the Power BI service (app.powerbi.com), read other Power BI articles, and work effectively in Microsoft Fabric.

Tip

New to Power BI? Start with What is Power BI? for a product overview, then return here to learn the terminology. Ready to get hands-on? See Get around in Power BI service.

Power BI service capabilities

The Power BI service enables you to perform a variety of tasks. You can broadly categorize these tasks into two main activities: creating and sharing content and consuming and interacting with content.

Create and share content

Users who create and share content in Power BI service are often referred to as designers or creators. They play a key role in building and organizing content within the Power BI service, enabling others to consume and interact with data effectively.

  • Build reports and dashboards: Use data from semantic models to design interactive visuals and dashboards that convey insights effectively.
  • Organize content: Group related reports, dashboards, and datasets into workspaces or apps for better management and sharing.
  • Collaborate with others: Share content with colleagues or teams, assign roles, and manage permissions to ensure secure collaboration.
  • Publish apps: Bundle dashboards, reports, and datasets into apps for streamlined sharing with larger audiences.

Consume and interact with content

Users who consume and interact with the content in Power BI service are often referred to as end users, consumers, or business users. They primarily focus on interacting with and deriving insights from the content created by designers, enabling data-driven decision-making and collaboration within their organization.

  • View and explore reports: Interact with visuals, apply filters, and drill down into data to uncover insights.
  • Monitor dashboards: Stay updated on key metrics and trends by viewing live dashboards with real-time data.
  • Use apps: Access collections of reports and dashboards shared by others to gain insights relevant to your role or organization.
  • Collaborate on goals: Track progress and contribute to shared scorecards and metrics for team or organizational objectives.

By understanding these capabilities, users can maximize their productivity and collaboration within the Power BI service.

Key Power BI service concepts and terms

The following table lists some of the key concepts and terms used in the Power BI service. Understanding these terms helps you navigate the Power BI service more effectively.

Term Definition Learn more
Visualization A type of chart built by Power BI designers to display data from reports and semantic models; visualizations are interactive and allow slicing, filtering, and drilling into data. Interact with visuals in reports, dashboards, and apps
Semantic model (formerly known as dataset) A container of data used by designers to build reports, dashboards, and apps; can combine multiple data sources into a single model. How do designers assign permissions to semantic models?

How semantic models are shared with colleagues
Dashboard A single screen with tiles of interactive visuals, text, and graphics, often used to monitor metrics or tell a story. Dashboards for the Power BI service business users
Report One or more pages of interactive visuals, text, and graphics based on a single semantic model, often organized to address specific questions or areas of interest. Reports in Power BI

Reports versus dashboards
App A collection of dashboards, reports, and semantic models bundled together for sharing with individuals, groups, or organizations. End-user apps
Workspace A collaborative area where designers store and manage collections of dashboards, reports, and other Fabric items. Business users are assigned roles (Admin, Member, Contributor, or Viewer) to control what they can see and do. In Microsoft Fabric, workspaces can also contain lakehouses, notebooks, and other Fabric items. Learn more about workspaces
License and subscription Determines the level of access and features available to users in the Power BI service, such as free, Pro, or Premium licenses. Organizational licenses and subscriptions for Fabric and Power BI

Licenses and subscriptions for business users
Capacity A dedicated set of resources used to enhance performance and scalability for Power BI content. Power BI Premium (P SKUs) and Microsoft Fabric (F SKUs, F64 or larger) capacities let users with a free license consume shared content. Capacity is also required to use Copilot. Manage your Fabric capacity
Copilot An AI assistant built into Power BI that helps you create reports, analyze data, and generate natural-language summaries and insights. Copilot is enabled by default but requires a paid Fabric capacity (F2 or higher) or Power BI Premium (P1 or higher). Overview of Copilot for Power BI
Workbook An Excel file uploaded to the Power BI service, which you can view or use as a data source for reports and dashboards. Get data from Excel workbook files

Publish to Power BI from Microsoft Excel
Dataflow A collection of data transformation steps stored in the Power BI service, enabling reusable and centralized data preparation. Creating a dataflow

Introduction to dataflows and self-service data prep

Next steps by role in Power BI

Now that you know the core concepts, here's where to go based on what you want to do:

I want to... Go here
Explore the Power BI service interface Get around in Power BI service
View and interact with reports and dashboards Interact with reports as a business user
Build, publish, or edit a report Tour the report editor in Power BI
Share content with colleagues Collaborate and share in Power BI
Use Copilot to analyze data Overview of Copilot for Power BI
Understand licensing Licenses and subscriptions for business users

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