Today, Microsoft is announcing a number of updates to the Power BI for Office 365 preview which provide customers with improved data search, including natural language querying, and 3D data mapping visualization. Microsoft is continually leveraging Bing’s expertise in big data, mapping and machine learning to make more intelligent online services, and these Power BI for Office 365 preview updates are a great example of how Bing has influenced other Microsoft technologies to move beyond the search box.
With Power Map Preview, a new add-in for Excel 2013, Bing helps people plot geographic and temporal data visually on Bing Maps. For example, people can see a 3D representation of a company’s revenue by sales region and opportunities by product category – all plotted on a Bing Map.
Another exciting new feature included in today’s updates is Q&A. With Q&A, Microsoft looked at how people experienced Bing search and used that knowledge to enable enterprise customers to ask questions of their data and generate stunning visual results in an interactive chart or graphs. The example below demonstrates how a person could use Q&A to search a database of Olympics data to find the number of gold medals received by country in 2008 and automatically receive the answer in the form of a beautiful map-based visualization.
To check out these technologies sign up for the Power BI for Office 365 preview at www.powerbi.com and download the new Excel 2013 add-ins powered by Bing.
– The Bing Team
