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I have worked with files quite successfully in the 400-500 MB range. I believe up to 1 GB is supported but you may want to start looking at doing live connections at that point. Now, remember that the source data may be significantly larger than that. Power BI tablular model does columnar compression and is really good at crunching up data.
Power BI is primarily intended to be a self-service reporting tool for business end users. I would not classify it as a heavy duty data mining/data wrangling tool although you can do some of the same sorts of things, it is not really primarily intended for that purpose. And by that I mean doing things like automatically returning statistics and distributions about your data, etc. You can get there with Power BI, but it is work.
For the last couple of questions, Please see this post regarding How to Get Your Question Answered Quickly: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/How-to-Get-Your-Question-Answered-Quickly/ba-p/38490
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