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?
Time for another correction… A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how to load data into a Power Pivot model using Power Query. As I was writing it, I was very excited about being able to decouple my Power Pivot models from physical data by using Power Query. Unfortunately, at a time, … Continue reading Date Management Gateway Now Supports Refresh from Power Query
In this post I wanted to address several general confusions about Power BI and Microsoft Office. Sometimes I wonder if these confusions have been engineered by design or whether they occurred serendipitously… The most important point to understand is that Power BI is intended to be bundled with the Office 365 Pro version of the … Continue reading Support of Power BI across various versions of Microsoft Office
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?
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
I have to admit, I like Power Query more and more every day. Even though on one hand sometimes I feel that the tool will only appeal to a very specific type of power users, on the other hand, I can't help but feel that the tool is so good that I wonder if it … Continue reading How to load Power Query directly into Power Pivot
It appears that Satya Nadella has added an additional layer of context to the already ambitious Microsoft strategy of transforming itself into a "devices and services" company by declaring that "Going forward, it's a mobile-first, cloud-first world". I believe that it is safe to assume that in the near future, the roadmap of every Microsoft … Continue reading Microsoft self-service BI on premise vs cloud
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
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