Microsoft has announced the addition of significant new features to the Power BI for Office 365 preview, a self-service business intelligence (BI) service delivered through Office 365 first introduced at the Worldwide Partner Conference in July.

The updates include natural language search with Q&A and improved experiences in two preview add-ins for Excel with 3D mapping visualizations through Power Map and improved data search in Power Query. More specifically:

1. Q&A allows customers to search their enterprise data using natural language query and instantaneously generate stunning visual results. To see Q&A in action, watch this video.
2. Power Map (formerly code name “GeoFlow”) has been updated to include new region-based visualization tools that color-code geo-political areas including zip codes, counties, states, countries and regions. Additionally, Power Map now enables customers to create videos that can be optimized for a number of devices and shared through social media, PowerPoint slides and Office 365. For more information about these updates, see this post on the Microsoft Excel blog.
3. Power Query now includes an improved online search experience and an expanded number of available datasets including those from data.gov and the Windows Azure Marketplace, in addition to Wikipedia.

To learn more and register for the preview visit www.powerbi.com. You can also download Power Map and Power Query along with sample datasets on the Power BI add-in Getting Started page. To see Power BI for Office 365 in action, watch this demonstration.