Power BI

Sep

2015

My Thoughts on Calculated Tables in Power BI

Yesterday was a terrific day for all of Microsoft Power BI fans. Microsoft released updates for Power BI Service, Power BI Mobile and Power BI Desktop (with an unbelievable 44 new features) – which basically means no matter whether you are a developer, BI professional or an end user, all of you got something new to play with along with this release. The blogs give a lot of details on what those new features are, so I wouldn’t be going over them. But I wanted to take a moment to pen down a few moments on my thoughts on a new modeling feature within this release – Calculated Tables.

Chris Webb has already posted his thoughts on Calculated Tables in Power BI and I am pretty sure Marco Russo / Alberto Ferrari will post some on the same pretty soon (if not, this is an open request from my side for Marco & Alberto to post something on the topic, pretty please ) – [Update 9/28/2015 Read Transition Matrix using Calculated Tables]. As usual, a combination of posts from these folks are going to be the best resource for any topic in the Modeling side, and I learn most of my stuff from them. So you would be thinking – what exactly am I trying to achieve in this post? Well, I would like to add my 2 cents on the same and try to see if the community in general agrees with what I think and if not, to learn from the comments and the interaction this might generate.

I) How to build Calculated Tables in Power BI

Before I start on my thoughts on calculated tables, it might be a good idea to quickly see how we can create calculated tables.

1) First make sure that the version of Power BI is equal to or higher than 2.27.4163.351. (I am making a fair assumption that this feature will be enabled in all higher versions also released in the future). If not, download it from here

2) Now open any of your existing models in Power BI (or get some new data), and after that, click on the Data tab. You should be able to see the New Table icon in the Modeling tab on the top.

3) Click on the New Table icon, and then enter any DAX expression in the format that returns a table TableName = DAX Expression that returns a table Once you do that, then you should be able to see the resultant columns in the new table.

II) When is the data in a Calculated Table processed

The official blog says quite a few things on the same-

A Calculated Table is like a Calculated Column.

It is calculated from other tables and columns already in the model and takes up space in the model just like a calculated column.

Calculated Tables are re-calculated when the model is re-processed.

So based on this information, I am going to go a step further and assume that the data in a calculated table is processed during the ProcessRecalc phase of processing. Also, this means that every time any of the source tables changes (like a new calculated column or new data), the data in the calculated table will also change. To prove this, let us try a simple experiment-

1) Make a calculated table called Test which will be the same as the Date table (which currently has just the Year column).

Note that measures from the source table are not brought along to the calculated table, which is as expected.

2) Now go to the Date table (which is our source table in this case) and then add a new calculated column called TestColumn with 1 as the value.

Note that when we added a calculated column in the source table, the column was replicated in the calculated Table also with the same name. The only difference is that the source table shows an icon for calculated column. This shows that the ProcessRecalc that happens in the source table when a new calculated column is made, also recalculates the calculated table.

III) My thoughts on Calculated Tables

Based on my understanding so far, there are times when I think I should use calculated tables and times when I should not use calculated tables. So here it goes –

a) When NOT to use calculated tables

If you have a way of replicating the calculated table in some form of ETL or source query (even a SQL View), you should not use a Calculated table. Why? A couple of reasons

If done from ETL / source query, the engine will see the result as a regular table, which means parallel processing of the tables can be done (unlike now, where the ProcessData phase of the source tables have to finish first before the calculated tables can be processed). So calculated tables could lead to slower data processing time.
A ProcessRecalc happens every time you do a process full, and adding more calculated tables (as well as calculated columns) unnecessarily will increase the processing time. Also, during development of very large models, you might have to wait for a long time after each calculation is made for the data to appear, since all dependent tables will also have to be recalculated (unless you turn off the automatic calculation mode).

This one is more an assumption and further research will be needed to validate this, but I am putting it forward anyways. Just like a calculated column is not that optimized for data storage compared to a regular column, I suspect that a calculated table will also not be optimized for storage compared to a regular table. If this is true, this might affect query performance.

b) When to use calculated tables

There are a lot of scenarios where you would want to use calculated tables and I have listed a few of the scenarios below

During debugging complex DAX expressions, it might be easier for us to store the intermediate results in a calculated table and see whether the expressions ate behaving as expected.
In a lot of self-service BI scenarios or Prototype scenarios, it is more important to get the results out there faster and hence, it might be difficult or not worth the effort to fiddle with the source queries. Calculated tables can be a quick and easy method to get the desired table structures.
A kind of scenario that I see very often during prototyping / PoCs is when there are 2 facts in an excel file which are given for making reports. As seasoned users of Power Pivot / Power BI, we know that we will have to create a proper data model with the dimensions. Now, I might need to create a dimension which gets me the unique values from both the tables. For eg, in the below example, I need the Country dimension to get values from both the tables (USA, Canada, Mexico). It might be easier to write an expression for a calculated table like shown below

Country = DISTINCT(UNION(DISTINCT(Table1[Country]), DISTINCT(Table2[Country])))

There are times (like in some role playing dimensions) where you will need to replicate the columns / calculated columns (or even delete) in another table also, even if the columns are built at a later phase in the project. Calculated tables are a perfect match for that, as you will only need to make the changes in one table, and the changes will flow down to the calculated table during ProcessRecalc phase (remember our previous example where we created a TestColumn in the Date table, and the change was reflected in our calculated table also).
Calculated tables can help in speeding up DAX expressions. This is very similar to the technique of using aggregate tables in SQL database to speed up the calculations in SQL.
Quick and easy way to create calendar tables (like Chris showed in his blog)

This is still a very early stage as far as Calculated tables are concerned, and I am pretty sure we are going to see some very innovative uses as well as benefits of calculated tables in the days to come. I might also learn that some of my assumptions are wrong, and if I do, I will come back and update this post to the best I can. Meanwhile, feel free to comment on your thoughts / concerns / feedback.

Update – 9/28/2015

Transition Matrix using Calculated Tables – Alberto Ferrari
Use Calculated Table to Figure Out Monthly Subscriber Churn – Jeffrey Wang

Aug

2015

Power BI Tip: Making similar sized KPI Boxes / Charts

Recently, I got asked by one of my readers if there is an easier way to make similar sized KPI boxes or charts in Power BI, other than manually resizing each individual visualization. As you know, making similar sized KPI boxes and / or charts are a design technique to make your reports symmetric and more aesthetically pleasing. Currently Power BI does not offer us a way to key in the width / height of the visualizations and it might seem like manual resizing is the only option. This tip is a much more simpler and precise way to do the same.

I) Making Similar Sized Charts

Making similar sized charts are easy. For that, click on the completed chart that you want to copy and then press CTRL + C on the keyboard to copy the chart. After that, press CTRL + V to paste the chart.

Now, you can go ahead and change the dimensions and measures of the second (and also the chart time), but one at a time. You should have a same sized different chart now.

The reason why I said to do it one at a time is because you will lose the chart if you remove all the dimensions and measures.

II) Making Similar Sized KPI Boxes

Now this is a little bit more trickier. Let’s say I use the same CTRL + C, CTRL + V to copy paste the textbox.

Now when I try to change the measure, notice how I can’t just replace the existing measure with the new one. I tried putting it on the card as well as on the Fields section. And when I try to remove the measure from the Fields, the entire card disappears.

To get this to work, first change the chart type to something else, say a pie chart. Then drag and drop the new measure into the Values section. Make sure to remove the old measure and then revert back to the card visualization. Voila, now you have two KPI boxes of the same size.

Now that you know this trick, go forth and make some pretty dashboards in Power BI!

You can also make some cool indicators on your KPI box with this trick that I showed in a previous post.

Note : Created using Power BI Desktop version listed below

Aug

2015

Using DAX to make your Power BI DataViz more meaningful

One of the best features I like about Power BI Desktop is that the data acquisition, data modeling and data visualization functionalities are all integrated in a user friendly way. I don’t have to leave the Power BI desktop to perform any of these common operations when I am playing with my data, unlike so many other tools. Why is this important? Because you tend to be more productive when you have everything you need in one place and also, you tend to be more creative when you have the power to model the data along with making your visualizations. DAX has some really powerful data modeling capabilities, and when you couple that with Power BI, you can start giving more meaning to your visualizations and get faster insights. I recently made a video on my company’s blog site on how to analyze Promotion Effectiveness and for the same, I was using a dashboard made in Power BI Desktop. I am just highlighting two examples of how I used DAX to make my visualizations better.

I) Make better Sparklines by Highlighting

In my Promotion Effectiveness Analytics demo, the sparklines highlight (instead of just filtering) the value for the months where the selected promotions ran. This gives us a better understanding of what is happening before, during and after the promotion. Now, this is not possible out of the box in Power BI, but with just a little bit of DAX magic, we can make this work.

1) First let us see how to build a simple sparkline in Power BI. For that, select the month & sales and make it as a line chart.

2) Next, let us remove all the format options so that it looks like a sparkline. Also feel free to resize it

3) Make a new bar chart for Sales by Promotions, so that we can use it to filter the sparkline.

You can see that the sparkline automatically gets cross-filtered to only the months where the promotion ran. This is great but what would add more value is if we could see the months highlighted instead of just filtered. That would let us know how the sales are before, during and after the promotions instead of just during the promotions.

4) Make a new measure by clicking on the dropdown next to the table, and then use the formula below

Sales Amount Total = CALCULATE([Sales Amount], ALL(Promotion))

Basically, we are making a measure which will show the Sales irrespective of whether the Promotions are filtered.

5) Now add the new measure to our sparkline (make sure to give it a lighter color like light grey for a better effect).

Now you can see that the the grey line shows the sales for all the promotions while the green line highlights just for the selected promotion. You can also use this technique in other creative ways, for e.g., to highlight the max and min points of a sparkline.

II) Waterfall charts for Measures

In my Promotion Effectiveness Analytics demo, I created a Waterfall chart to show the breakdown of Customer Visits. Basically,

Customer Visits (This Year) = Customer Visits (Last Year) – Lost Customers + New Customers

I have individual measures for each of those, and in this case, a waterfall chart would be a great way to show the breakdown. However, we can only put columns in the category axis for waterfall chart in Power BI. But with some data modeling, we can get this done.

1) Make a dummy dimension called Customer Retention with just one column and 3 values – Last Year, New and Lost. I just made the dummy table in a text file and imported it to Power BI.

Note that this is a disconnected table and will have no relations to any other table.

2) Create a new measure called Customer Visits as shown below

Customer Visits = IF(HASONEVALUE(‘Customer Retention'[Customer Retention]),
                        SWITCH(VALUES(‘Customer Retention'[Customer Retention]),
                                “New”, [New Customers],
                                “Lost”, [Lost Customers],
                                “Last Year”, [Visits (LY)]))

Basically you are assigning the appropriate measures for New, Lost and Last Year based on the values for the disconnected Customer Retention table.

3) Now just make a Waterfall chart with the Customer Retention column and Customer Visits measure to clearly see the breakdown.

Hope you got some ideas on what all we can do when we combine DAX with dataviz. Stay tuned for more as we expect to see Microsoft release more functionalities around the tool.

Note : Created using Power BI Desktop version listed below

Feel free to watch my video on analyzing promotion effectiveness by clicking on the image below

Jul

2015

How to add an Indicator to Power BI Desktop

Yesterday was an exciting day – Microsoft released the GA version of Power BI and with it comes an impressive list of new features and functionalities. One of the new features that I was really interested in was – Rich control over visual coloring, including conditional formatting in Reports. This opens up a whole new possibility of tweaking Power BI even when the feature is not available out of the box. Today’s blog is going to be an example of that! (NOTE: This workaround is needed to add an indicator on the version that was released on 7/24/2015. The Power BI team moves really FAST with updates and there is every possibility that some features which make this workaround redundant, might be added sooner than later.)

Adding a KPI to a card is easy and helpful. But what makes it more useful is if there is an indicator which gives an idea on how the KPI is performing. Right now, there is no way to add an indicator out of the box in Power BI. But thanks to the new features, we can implement a workaround which is not that perfect, but will work for now. The finished dataviz looks like below

Note that there are 3 features here that look like it is not possible out of the box:-

1) There is an up / down arrow which changes based on the Year over Year (YoY) change.

2) There is a bar indicator on the top of the arrow which changes color (red or green) based on YoY

3) The background for the entire KPI box has a custom color (Neither the card data visualization nor the text box has formatting capabilities). So how is this done? Follow the steps below:-

Up / Down Arrow

Currently, there is no way to add a dynamic image in Power BI. You can’t import a binary type image data into Power BI neither add the image URL. A static image will not do for our purpose as we want the arrow to change based on data.

1) Let’s say that I have a measure called YoY which is basically the difference of Current Year sightings and Previous Year UFO sightings. Now make a new measure called YoY change which is YoY Change = [YoY] & ” ” & IF(SUM([Sightings]) >= [Prevyear], “⇧”, “⇩”) Yes, the entire trick is based on using the Unicode characters for arrows as the indicator. Unicode characters will work without any issue and can be used in regular DAX measure expressions. The above measure will show an up arrow if the current year is greater than or equal to previous year, else down arrow. You can also explore the other Unicode characters if you want to look for alternative symbols.

2) Now we can just use this new measure in a card. The measure expression will ensure that the Up arrow or Down arrow gets displayed accordingly.

Bar Indicator with Color on top of Arrow

Currently, there is no way to format a text box or a card viz. Else that would have been a good way to achieve this functionality.

1) For this demo, I have made a table with 1 column called Meaning with 2 rows – Up and Down. And then I made a simple measure that displays 1 for Up if the current year is greater than or equal to previous year or 1 for Down if the reverse is true.

PosNeg = SUMX(VALUES(temp[Meaning]), IF([Meaning]=”Up” && SUM([Sightings]) >= [Prevyear] || [Meaning]=”Down” && SUM([Sightings]) < [Prevyear],1))

2) Make a bar chart out of the Meaning column and the new PosNeg measure.

3) Click on the Format tab (on the right hand side panel) and then ensure that all properties except Y axis has been turned off. Then expand the data colors and choose the default color a Green. You can also click on the Show All property and manually make sure that the Up value is Green. (If the default value for your data is Down, then make sure that the color is Red).

4) Now choose a filter condition which will show the bar chart for Down value. After that, go to the Format option and choose the color for Down as Red.

Power BI remembers that Up has a color of Green and Down has a color of Red. You can test it by toggling the filters / slicers.

5) Make sure the transparency of the background is set to 100% (don’t turn it off as shown in the image below) and also turn off the Y axis now. Resize the bar chart and place it above the previous card viz for Up / Down arrow indicator.

Now you have got a nice color indicator also!

Background for KPI Box

Right now, there is no way to add a background color to the KPI box, as we cannot format the card data viz or the textbox viz. But what we can o as a workaround is to select any column, make it into a bar chart and then turn off all the options so that we get a blank rectangle. Then go to the background option and choose the color of your choice.

Feel free to drop in the previous two indicators that we made into the colored rectangle and now we have got a much prettier and useful KPI box. There is a lot of different ways in which you can mix and match this technique. For example, how about using a bubble indicator instead of the bar?

Note that these dataviz can not be pinned to a Dashboard, as we can not overlay visualizations in a dashboard, However, these will work just fine if you upload it to a normal Power BI Report. Having the control over formatting has greatly increased the ways in which you can tweak the reports and I am loving it. Looking forward to what all surprises the Power BI team has for us now!

Nov

2013

QR Codes in Power View

Today, I was reading a good article by Florian Mader – A GPS Photo Gallery in Power BI. That inspired me to write something on Power View and since I had not originally planned to write a blog today, I decided to write something short.

QR Codes are not available by default in Power View and it is normal to hear many people say that it is not possible in Power View. The reason behind such a conclusion is because Power View is not at all flexible and you don’t even have simple options to change your chart colors, let alone program a new chart type (which is not a bad thing, as the focus is on ease of use and simplicity. More options would make the tool more complex). However, in this case, we can utilize the power of the internet and Image URL feature of Power Pivot to generate QR Codes. For this post, I am using the model below with some sample data.

The fact table consists of Customer name, Brand Name, Date and Sales. The requirement is to display the QR code for the selected Brand. For that, follow the steps below:-

1) To create the QR code, it is necessary to create a calculated field in the data model. Since the QR code should be there for each brand, the calculated field should also be in the Brand table. The formula for the calculated field QRCode is given below

=”http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.php?s=8&d=” & [Brand] & “” & [URL]

My regular readers might remember this URL from my post – Generating QR Codes in SSRS. There are other QR code generating sites also, I am just using this as an example.

2) Once the URL is generated, make sure that the Data Category property in the Advanced tab is set to Image URL.

3) Now we can use the QRCode field in Power View to display the QR Codes. You might get a warning to enable external content, which is normal.

4) We can also use it along with other visualisations like shown below.

The output of the QR Code from my smartphone is given below:-

Limitations Now that said, there are a few limitations. It is absolutely necessary to have a calculated field to make the QR Codes. This means that the values will be pre-computed and we can not add a measure or some value that changes during the run time of the report to the URL of the report. Also, we can not make much changes to the size of the QR Codes as we don’t have a lot of control on that. This technique can also be used to get other chart types into Power View. However, the same limitations will apply. That is all for now, time for me to get back to baby-duty .

Nov

2013

Category Shading for Regions in Power Map

It’s been a really busy month for me professionally (with the PASS Summit 2013, SQL Saturday Charlotte BI Edition, etc) as well as personally (with a steady stream of family flying in to visit the new born baby as well as looking after a new born baby – how I miss my 8 hrs. of sleep!). I remember people saying to me that things are going to change drastically once you have a baby. Well, what can I say other than it’s 100% true . Understandably, I don’t get the same amount of time to spend on blogging and with all the stuff that has been happening behind the scenes, I decided to procrastinate till everything gets a little bit more calmer. That is when I was reading through an article and fell upon this gem of a line from Zip Zaglar – “If you wait until all the lights are “green” before you leave home, you’ll never get started on your trip to the top”. So I decided to shake off my laziness and get started on blogging about a cool feature in Power Map that has not been explored or blogged much – Category Shading for Regions.

The objective of this post is to explore the category shading feature in Power Map as well as try to see what kind of questions can be answered (after all, a feature that just adds flashiness and no business value is not desirable). For this post, I will be using the stats for my blog for visitors from the USA by browsers.

With this data, I created a simple Power Map visualization which shows the number of visitors by state. (Check out this link if you are new to Power Map or need more info on how to create this visualization).

With the above visualization, I can answer questions like – Which state in the US has the most number of readers? I can easily see that California and Texas are where I have got the most number of readers. Now that I have a general understanding of the visitors, I am going to ask a few more specific questions based on the browsers that they are using:-

I) What is the dominant browser for my readers in each of the states?

To answer this question, bring the Browser field to the category and now you should notice an icon which appears on the top-right of the category textbox (denoted by 2 in the image below). Click on the icon and select the No shading option as shown below.

Now, I can see the results for myself. Interestingly, the dominant browser in almost all the states is Internet Explorer. There are a couple of states (6 to be precise) where Chrome is the dominant browser. This brings me to my next question.

II) How dominant are the leading browsers within each state with respect to their competing browsers in that state?

Click on the category shading icon and select the “Shade based on category value within location” option. Now you should see the below visualization.

From this, you can easily see the leading browsers based on the color as well as the shading shows the share for the leading browser. The darker the shade for the color, the more dominant the browser is within the region. For eg, you can see that Internet Explorer is pretty dominant in Alaska as well as North Dakota, while Chrome is pretty dominant in Wyoming. In California, you can see that IE is leading but not by much.

However, when I saw the actual numbers in the tooltip, I found it to be really less. This brought me to my third question.

III) Which states have more visitors and what is the dominant browser there?

Click on the category shading icon and select the “Shade based on category value compared to all other values” option. Now you should see the below visualization

You can see that it is a refined version of the map which was obtained initially by not putting the category field. The darker the color, the more number of visitors I have. So from the above image, we can easily see that the top 4 states by readership counts are California (Internet Explorer), Texas (Internet Explorer), Washington (Internet Explorer) and North Carolina (Chrome). And now looking at the previous image (for Question II) in combination with this image, we can see that the difference is not much and that the competition between the browsers are pretty tight across the states. Also, for the three states where the difference is really big (Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming), we can see that the counts are pretty small and hence not that significant.

IV) How do the states within the same dominant browser measure up against each other?

For this, click on the category shading icon and select the “Shade based on category value compared to other values in the category” option. Now you should see the below visualization.

From this image, I can see that for Internet Explorer, the top 3 states are California, Texas and Washington & for Chrome, the top 3 states are North Carolina, Iowa and Utah. It is important to understand that there might be other states which has more value for that browser. For eg, California might have more readers using Chrome than North Carolina, but it is not taken into account since Chrome is not the dominant browser there. Time to finish this lengthy post and this will be all from me today. But before I sign off, I wanted to let you know that you can animate this kind of visualization across time by dragging the date field to the time-play axis. This can answer the same 4 questions we asked above across time, which is pretty powerful. Also, we can look at the existing set of data with Power View and answer more interesting questions – a sneak peek of a simple dashboard is given below. Have fun with Power BI till we speak again!

Sep

2013

Power Map Preview – Exploring the NEW features!

Woot! Microsoft just announced the pre-release availability of the refreshed builds for Power Map with some really cool new features and boy, I must say that I am PUMPED! For folks that know me, I have been doing quite a number of presentations on Power Map (and geospatial analytics in general) and there were a couple of features that I really really wished for in Power Map. Well, looks like the Power Map team heard my requests and I feel this release is a big step forward.

First of all, here are some useful links (including the download link for the refreshed bits):-

Power BI Forum: Post and answer questions for the product team and community
Power BI Product Page on Office.com: Download requirements, directs to Web Download page below
Power Map Download Page: Download the bits on Microsoft Download Center

Now let’s see some of the new features that has come up since my last post on Power Map.

I) Recognizing geographic data and Plotting them on launching Power Map On launching Power Map, the columns with geographic data are automatically recognized and plotted. For example, I had some data of the population of North Carolina by zip code as shown below

Now when I launched Power Map, this is what I saw

The best part is that the geographic columns seemed to be recognized correctly even if the they are named something other than City / State / Zip Code, etc. For eg, I renamed the City to CVDS and still was able to see it correctly mapped to City.

And anyways, you still have the option to change it from the drop down. All in all, great feature and saves me a couple of unnecessary clicks.

II) Support for Flat Map

I know, I know, all of you would be thinking – what’s so special about this? After all, what made Power Map unique was that it had the ability to do 3-D geospatial analysis. Well, that is pretty cool but there are certain times when only a flat map would do. For eg, when you are looking at a worldwide data like population by countries, you want to see both sides of the globe. Earlier in Power Map, it used to look like shown below:-

We could see only one half of the globe and had to rotate to see the other half. Now we have this icon to convert the 3D map to a flat map (and back to 3D if required!)

This is REALLY cool!

III) Support for Regions Visualization (Chloropeth Mapping)

Now this is the most awesome enhancement according to me – support for chloropeth mapping or shading a geographical area (and I had actually requested as a Connect suggestion during the beta release of GeoFlow). Let me show you how the visualization looks for the population data for North Carolina

Best part is that it is damn right simple – just change the visualization from Column to Region (and yes, that also means that we have a fourth visualization type now – apart from Column, Bubble and HeatMap)

The Region visualization is only present at a Country / Region, State / Province, County or Zip / Postal Code level (which means City is not available) and is available across all countries (not just the USA). If you try to use a geographical level which is not one of the above, you will receive the following error and the chart type will be changed to Column.

I LOVE this feature and more than that, adore the way how simple it is for users to geocode at that level (no need to bring in complex shapefiles to geocode county/zip code level data like in SSRS!). I can already see a lot of use for it.

IV) Change Color for Data Series

Now this is another simple but very useful new feature – the ability to change colors for data series. You can see this new option in the Layer options.

You can also see that the display options of the Themes button has changed and now the colors also show up.

V) Exporting Tours as Videos

A question that consistently makes the rounds when I present on Power Map is – “How do I “unlock” the tours from the Excel workbook? Is it possible to share it through any other medium?” Well, the answer has been No until now. The current build allows you to export your tours as a video and now this can be shared across all your channels. For creating videos, there is a new Create Video button on the ribbon and then you can select the video quality also.

To demonstrate the feature, I have exported a tour from one of my recent presentations. This tour is around 5 mins long and investigates the myth – Are Refugees flooding Industrialized countries? It took quite some time for me to export the tour as a video even in the 360p mode, but that is understandable I guess.

Power Map Tour exported as a video

Conclusion

Overall, I feel this is a build with some really awesome features. Apart from the new features I described, there are also some UI changes but these changes are simple enough to understand, so I am not going over them. There are still some really basic functionalities that are desired like filtering your data and drilling down on the geographic levels (and I found out at least one bug which I will be filing on Connect soon), but we should not forget that this is not the final version. So I am happy and I would encourage everyone to try out the new build.

Jul

2013

Power BI for Office 365

Great news!!! Today, at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced a new offering – Power BI for Office 365. Quoted from Microsoft – “Power BI for Office 365 is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) solution that enables our customers to easily gain insights from their data, working within Excel to analyze and visualize the data in a self-service way. It works with Office 365 to help customers share insights, find answers and stay connected to their data from their favorite mobile devices.” For those of you who have the time, I would recommend going through the links that I have collected below. And for those who don’t have the time, let me do a very quick summary:- 1) Discover, analyze, and visualize with Power BI for Office 365, which includes Power Query (formerly known as Data Explorer), Power Map (formerly known as GeoFlow), Power Pivot (formerly known as PowerPivot – notice the space between the words) and Power View (for a change, I like that the names are standardized with a space after Power). 2) Create Power BI Sites to share live interactive reports. Power BI Sites are dedicated collaborative BI workspaces in Office 365 for sharing data and insights with colleagues. 3) Ask questions and get back instant answers with the new Q&A feature that uses natural language query technology to provide you with immediate answers in the form of interactive charts and graphs based on the questions you type into the speech bubble. 4) Browse Excel and Power View reports with HTML 5. Stay connected with the touch-optimized Power BI mobile app. BI users can access and receive live updates on their reports through their browser with HTML5 or through a mobile application designed for their tablet or touch-enabled device, either Microsoft Power BI for Windows or Microsoft Power BI for iPad. 5) Refresh your data on demand or define a schedule. The Data Management Gateway allows your IT department to enable data refresh from Office 365 to your favourite on-premises data sources. 6) No announcement on pricing or preview date (except for “later this summer”). The natural language feature looks pretty impressing even though I doubt whether the experience is going to be as seamless as shown in the demo. Also, the bubble chart shown in the demo (also shown in the image below) looked extremely jazzy but may end up just being eye-candy in real life. I would love to finally see the Mobile (and ofcourse iPad) solution come through with Power BI, although I am a tad bit disappointed that this feature is not there for the SharePoint version. There are a couple of official posts on this offering and I have collated them below:- 1) What powers Power BI in Office 365?
2) Introducing Power BI for Office 365
3) Announcing Power BI for Office 365
4) Register for Power BI Preview Watch the Day 1 Vision Keynote from WPC 2013 on demand here! You can also read some of the initial reactions to Power BI below:- 1) Some Thoughts About Power BI – Chris Webb
2) Microsoft Office 365 Cloud Power BI – Jen Underwood
3) Microsoft Announces Power BI for Office 365 – Andrew Brust
4) Power Business Intelligence for Office365 – Jen Stirrup Exciting times indeed for Microsoft BI and Self Service BI in general. I can’t wait to get my hands on the preview.

Power BI

My Thoughts on Calculated Tables in Power BI

Power BI Tip: Making similar sized KPI Boxes / Charts

Using DAX to make your Power BI DataViz more meaningful

How to add an Indicator to Power BI Desktop

QR Codes in Power View

Category Shading for Regions in Power Map

Power Map Preview – Exploring the NEW features!

Power BI for Office 365

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