what are advantages/disadvantages of Power BI through office 365, and power BI desktop?

[kfarynowski]

For analysts, those developing dashboards, base data, or for general consumers and users of the data and dashboards, what would be considerations as to when would one download and use desktop version vs. using the app? 

[ashishrj]

@kfarynowski Here are some of the points to be considered apart from what mentioned above!

Power BI through Office 365 : 

- Development in Excel 2013/2010 and upload to sharpoint online in Office 365

- Needs additional plugin (Power Query) to be downloaded and enable few plugins (Power Map,Power Pivot, Power View)

- Reports rendering require silverlight to be downloaded

- Refresh data daily/weekly and limited data sources refresh support

- Frequent crashing of Excel file and bit slower for large dataset (depends on your system RAM and CPU)

- Not easy to understand for novice users

Power BI Desktop:

- Development in Power BI Desktop independent of Excel and hosting on Power BI Online

- Just download free Power BI Desktop tool. No additional plugins required

- Reports rendered using HTML 5. Hence no need to download any other software to view in browser

- Refresh data hourly/daily/weekly and supports many data sources for refresh

- Doesn't hang / crah pbix file 

- Easy to understand and use for novice users

[adelheni]

Power Bi is a very powerful tool but like any other, it has its issues and limitations

Here is some of them

1. Provides AutoML only in Power BI DataFlows. This means you cannot do AutoML in Power BI Desktop. More importantly, it also means you cannot do AutoML after the data model is built.

2. Advanced location intelligence is still not available.

3. No graph analytics yet.

4. DAX is very rigid and has a steep learning curve to master it to address any complex scenarios. In fact, PowerQuery & M is the most powerful tool in Power BI, whereas DAX and the data model is a hindrance of equal weight to Power BI.

It's time now for Microsoft to rethink the strategy and do something like

1. Make data flows available in Power BI Desktop.

2. Make Data Model & DAX optional.

3. Enhance Location intelligence aka Spatial Analytics, including 3D-Maps from Excel

4. Introduce Social or Graph intelligence aka Graph Analytics. That's when it becomes a true self-service business intelligence platform.

[Seth_C_Bauer · Accepted solution]

To add to what smoupre said.
I'll make the assumption that we are just talking about Power BI Service, and Power BI Desktop.
Service - provides immediate connection to existing models/files with visuals and is purely the front end where you can create and share visualizations in a multiple ways.
Pros: It's quick to connect, create reports, share in multiple ways
Cons: You can't currently save reports, so anything you currently create, you would have to re-create if something happened.

Desktop - Allows you to create models from multiple sources of data. Create visuals and deploy to the Service.
Pros: Great method to test out ideas, change and test model design, mash data together for reporting, create reports
Cons: Possible added step in deployment, may get feature updates a little behind the service, no sharing capability on it's own.

As a side note,
If you do have an AS Connector set up and connected in the Service. If you use an AS tabular model to connect to (Explore) in the Desktop and create visualization there, when you deploy that file to the service, it will automatically become a live connection to the model. (same for Excel)

There is alot of flexibility in the tools set, so really it depends on your use case and what you want to accomplish with it.

[Greg_Deckler]

I agree that the content packs are a fantastic addition.

[Greg_Deckler]

Well, it is my understanding that the Power BI for O365 is going away eventually and it will all be Power BI 2.0. You can use either Excel or Power BI Desktop with Power BI 2.0, the advantage of the Power BI Desktop is it is lighter weight than Excel and you have access to all of the new visualizations.

[kfarynowski]

I'm not seeing the functionality for scheduled data refreshes in the desktop verion.  Am I missing it?  Or only in the "pro" paid version? 

[Greg_Deckler]

That functionality is supplied through the service. When you sign in, go to your "down arrow" icon and select Power BI Personal Gateway" to install it. That is what does the refresh.