The Power BI Ecosystem
Meera owns Leaf & Cup, a small tea-shop chain with one branch in Pune and one in Mumbai. Every Monday her analyst, Arjun, emails her a spreadsheet of last week's sales, and every Monday she squints at it on her phone. Power BI can replace that routine, but it is not a single program. It is a family of tools, and knowing which one does which job stops you hunting for a button in the wrong place.
The rule
Build in Desktop, share through the Service, glance on Mobile.
- Power BI Desktop is a free Windows application where reports are made. You connect to data, clean it with Power Query, build the data model, write DAX calculations and lay out report pages. Your work is saved as a
.pbixfile. - Power BI Service is the cloud side, opened in a browser at app.powerbi.com. You publish a report from Desktop into a workspace there. The Service is where other people open the report, where data refresh is scheduled, where access is granted, and where dashboards and apps are assembled. It now sits inside Microsoft Fabric, so you may see other Fabric items next to your reports.
- Power BI Mobile is a set of apps for phones and tablets. They show reports and dashboards from the Service with touch-friendly filtering and data alerts. They are for reading, not building.
When you publish, the data model travels with the report. Microsoft used to call a published model a dataset; the current name is semantic model.
A few relatives complete the family:
| Tool | Job |
|---|---|
| Power BI Report Server | Hosts reports on a company's own servers instead of Microsoft's cloud |
| Power BI Report Builder | Designs paginated reports: fixed layouts such as invoices that print page by page |
| On-premises data gateway | Lets the Service reach data sitting inside an office network |
The Service can also edit reports in the browser, but Desktop is the complete workshop, which is why most projects start there.
The shortcut
Turn every task into a verb. Make it → Desktop. Share or schedule it → Service. Look at it on the move → Mobile.
Make
In Desktop, Arjun connects to the till exports, cleans them and designs a Weekly Sales page. He saves
leaf-and-cup-sales.pbix.
The common mistake is emailing .pbix files around. Arjun's report imports its data, so the file is a frozen snapshot from the moment it was last refreshed and saved, and anyone who has the file sees everything in it. The published copy is the one that refreshes and controls who sees what.
Drills
Answer fast — trust the rule.
Where does Arjun write the first DAX measure for a brand-new report?
Meera wants the report to refresh at 7 a.m. every day without Arjun opening anything. Where is that set up?
What are the Power BI Mobile apps built for?
Arjun's report imports its data. A colleague is emailed the .pbix in March and opens it in May. What sales does it show?
A bank must keep every report on its own servers, never in Microsoft's cloud. Which product fits?
Remember
- Build in Desktop, share through the Service, glance on Mobile.
- Shortcut: turn the task into a verb — make, share or schedule, view.
- Trap: an emailed
.pbixis a frozen copy with no access control; publish instead.