What is the main purpose of Power BI Service?

The main purpose of Power BI Service is to share and collaborate on reports. This platform allows users to publish their Power BI reports and dashboards to the cloud, making it accessible to other users within the organization or designated stakeholders. By providing a centralized location for sharing reports, Power BI Service enhances collaboration and ensures that team members can access the latest insights and data visualizations.

In addition to sharing, the service enables real-time access to data and the ability to interact with reports through features such as commenting, sharing insights, and creating bookmarks. This collaborative environment fosters a more data-driven culture within organizations, as it allows users to easily engage with and utilize the analytical tools that Power BI offers.

Creating and editing visualizations primarily takes place in Power BI Desktop, not in the service. While data cleaning and transforming is a necessary step in preparing data, this is typically done within Power Query in Power BI Desktop before publishing to the service. Storing datasets locally is also not aligned with the service's purpose, as Power BI Service is designed for cloud-based storage and accessibility.