I find it interesting that after it's been out for a long while, and after some great attempts by non-Microsoft sources to provide an adequate definition, I am still struggling with being able to provide a succinct explanation of what Power BI is to my customers. My best attempt thus far has boiled down to … Continue reading What is Power BI?
I just finished watching the hosted customer even in San Francisco where the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, COO Kevin Turner, CVP of Data Platform Group Quentin Clark and the SQL Server Product Marketing GM Eron Kelly officially introduced the new release of the SQL Server 2014. In this post I am not going to give … Continue reading Few thoughts on the SQL Server 2014 launch event in San Francisco
After I wrote the step by step guide on integrating on premise data with Power BI models I realized that I actually dispensed some bad advice. The basic premise of the post was to demonstrate how one may use Power Query to source data into a Power Pivot model in a very elegant way (at … Continue reading What is Power BI Gateway?
Now that Power BI is Generally Available (GA) I thought it would be useful to do a quick analysis of how Power View visualizations are supported in Power BI across the three media – Silverlight (default), HTML5 and Windows 8 App Please find a table below for a quick reference Feature Silverlight HTML5 Windows 8 … Continue reading HTML5 support In Power View and Power BI
In this post I will walk you through all the steps necessary to expose your on premise enterprise data to your Power BI users of Power Query in Excel and also will demonstrate how to source that data into a Power Pivot workbook. I am not going to give you too much theory, rather, I … Continue reading How to configure on premise access in Power BI and use Power Query to load on premise data into Power Pivot
There are now scores of blogs and web articles available that do a great job of introducing Power BI (a good example can be found here) so there is little value in re-hashing it in this post. I do, however, want to reflect and pontificate a bit on this announcement. The most important piece of … Continue reading A quick rant on Power BI, #confused….
Kasper de Jonge has recently posted a PowerPivot model, Access database with some financial data and a white paper that provides what I think is the absolutely best way to jump start a BI initiative focused on implementing financial metrics and KPIs. Please find the overview and the download link here. This is an absolute … Continue reading Modeling financial scenarios tutorial available from Microsoft
I have been really impressed with Microsoft Data Explorer the minute I had a chance to play with it as I was able to turn formatted Excel reports into legitimate data sources available for analysis. Fairly recently, an update to the tool delivered an uber critical feature that makes a huge impact on the world … Continue reading Unpivot data using Microsoft Data Explorer
The public preview of GeoFlow is now available here http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/download-geoflow-for-excel-FX104036784.aspx I would definitely grab the "Data Explorer" plug in while I were there...(also available here http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/download-data-explorer-for-excel-FX104018616.aspx) There are plenty of reviews and good tutorials of both products available elsewhere, but in the coming few days I will try to write about where I think these … Continue reading GeoFlow is going public
In this post I will review the latest version of SAP Visual Intelligence – 1.08 – and see how it stacks up against the Microsoft self-service BI tools, Excel, PowerPivot and PowerView. In the initial release, Visual Intelligence only supported SAP Hana, but in its latest iteration few other data sources are supported: CSV File … Continue reading SAP Visual Intelligence vs. Microsoft PowerPivot and PowerView
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