Introduction to PowerBI

Deeper insights through Power BI

Written by Geoff Smith for Aphelion Software

Microsoft’s hottest new business intelligence (BI) solution Power BI is the latest and greatest self-service BI offering from the software giant, delivered through Excel and Office 365. It opens up new data analysis and visualisation capabilities allowing business users to discover deeper insights from their local data as well as cloud data – all of this is made available from within the familiar tool that they already use, Excel.

A brief touch on the existing Power Pivot and Power View tools before we get into the magic of Power BI. Power Pivot is an add-in that extends on Excel’s built-in pivot table capabilities by allowing the user to import data from multiple sources and enabling the processing of much larger data quantities thanks to the VertiPaq engine.

 No specialised BI Skills

The intention here is to allow users with no specialised BI skills to develop effective data models and calculations. Couple to that, Power View is an interactive data visualisation tool also provided as an Excel add-in or as a feature of SharePoint. Power View gives users the muscle to explore their data intuitively and create meaningful visualisations, further emphasising the idea and power of self-service BI.Toolkit

Keeping these two tremendously useful tools in mind, I want to bring your attention to the new kid on the block and potentially one of the biggest game changers in self-service BI history: Power BI. Announced on 8 July 2013, Power BI is a cloud-based BI solution that falls part of Office 365. It comprises of the aforementioned Power Pivot and Power View, and introduces Power Query and Power Map which I will expand on shortly. 

I believe that this little toolkit will prove to be an invaluable companion to business users, providing them with completely new insights into their data and enabling them to make better decisions based on these. 

Power Query

Power Query (formerly Data Explorer) is in the simplest of terms, a data search tool. It enables the user to search for data and returns relevant data sets from local data sources as well as any other data source publically available online. The various new sources accessible by Power Query include OData feeds, Hadoop distributed file systems and even Facebook. 
After retrieving a set of data, Power Query is also able to apply different filtering and shaping functions in order to clean the data, merge datasets, or apply transformations such as from formatted text to JSON.

Power Map

Power Map (formerly Geoflow) is a 3D visualisation tool specifically for use with geographic and chronological data. The user has the ability to plot data across a three-dimensional globe within Excel. By including the time dimension, temporal changes in data can be animated over a period creating a dynamic and insightful presentation for the user. The map is also interactive, similar to Bing maps, putting the user in the driver seat and making exploring the data feel natural. The user can choose the metrics that they want to see and even zero in on points of interest for more detail.
Familiar

From the tools I’ve just mentioned, it’s easy to see how Power BI will allow business users to leverage the data around them in a way that is familiar. In addition to this, the integration with Office 365 offers a complete collaborative experience. Users can establish Power BI sites that allow for sharing of new insights with colleagues. Everything is connected, data is kept up to date, and reports are viewable across mobile devices.

If you want to get your hands dirty, visit the Power BI website and download the add-ins for Excel now! I will be spending some time getting familiar with the tools, so look out for my next article where I’ll walk through my experiences with the Power BI.