Microsoft's cloud-based business intelligence service is celebrating a major user growth milestone with a handful of new features, including the ability to import data from an Excel spreadsheet and turn it into live-updating charts and graphs.

 Power BI now has more than 5 million subscribers, who are using the service to take in business data and create dashboards they can use to better understand their businesses. Starting Tuesday, those subscribers will be able to use an Excel connector to easily "pin" live-updating data from the Excel desktop app to a Power BI dashboard.  Both that feature, and one that allows users to analyze data from Power BI in Excel, were previously available for beta testing and are now generally available.

The service will also get role-level security for cloud models and direct query. One user with access to a set of company data in Power BI can create one dashboard that will show users a subset of information based on what they're allowed to see.

Src:http://www.computerworld.com