See what components put the ‘Power’ into Power BI, and how they work together to enable self-service business intelligence

1. Leveraging Power BI
to Make Smart Business Decisions
Megan Caauwe
Business Intelligence Consultant

2. Agenda
Concept What is Power BI?
• Identify and explain the toolset
Demo How do you get started?
• How can you find and connect important data?
• How does the resulting data model feed the visualization tools?
• How can you share discovered insights with others?
Wrap-up Questions & Answers

3. Getting to Know You
Audience Poll
Who has heard some of the Power BI buzz?
• We already have Power BI at our company!
• Have heard about it, and did a bit of digging/playing on my own.
• Saw something about it once … but that’s about it.
• Never heard of it.
Which of the following best describes your role in the company?
• Member of a Management Team
• Member of an IT Team
• Tech-savvy Business User
• Other

4. Microsoft Power BI Toolset
Power Query
• Discover
• Combine
• Transform
• Share*
Power Pivot
• Connect
• Extend
• Train Behavior
Power View
• Visualize
• Interact
• Share
• Forecast*
Power Map
• Visualize
• Share
Q&A*
• Ask
• Interact
• Share
Quick-reference

5. Specifics on Power Query
Discover Can pull data directly from many
types of sources.
Contents of Excel, CSV, XML, and Text files or even lists of files and
associated metadata from within local or network-based folders.
Databases such as SQL, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, Sybase, etc.
SharePoint lists, OData feeds, Active Directory, SAP BusinessObjects,
etc.
Combine Can merge/append multiple queries
from differing data sources together
to form a single “table” for analysis.
Transform Can use options within the Query
Editor to clean up and refine the
query results.
Rename, add, or remove columns
Transpose an entire table, or simply unpivot a single column
Split single columns based on delimiter or number of characters
Change formatting within a column
Share* Publish common queries out to
O365 for others to find and use

6. Power Query Demonstration
In addition to connecting to existing database content, Power
Query can isolate table types of structures on websites, like
Wikipedia …
… and transform them into consumable content for use within a
Power Pivot data model.

7. Specifics on Power Pivot
Connect Beyond consuming the results of Power Query, it can directly
pull data from many types of sources, itself.
Can define relationships between tables, but keep potentially
confusing “primary key” columns hidden in the background.
Extend Add new, calculated content (including KPIs) into any table in
the model.
Train
Behavior
Replace potentially confusing database table and/or field names
with user-friendly labels.
Force text labels to sort in ways other than just alphabetical.
Define how numeric fields behave, like whether or not they
should roll up to a sum or average.
Add synonyms for use in O365 Q&A

8. Power Pivot Demonstration
Design/Modeling Tool in Microsoft Excel
Tabular / Data view allows you to preview and study the
appearance of your data.
Diagram view is a high-level summary of all tables connected to
your model, and the relationships tying them together.

9. Specifics on Power View
Visualize The designer tool is embedded within Microsoft Excel, as
of Office 2013.
Enables data from a Power Pivot model to be examined in
multiple forms including charts, maps and grids.
Interact Objects placed on the same canvas can react to each other
as you click around the dashboard content.
Can quickly add drill-through options to charts and maps,
to analyze data at multiple levels of detail.
Share Completed dashboards can be shared through SharePoint
on premise or O365, allowing others to review the content
with full interactivity.
Forecast* Apply predictive forecasting or hindcasting when viewing
dashboards via the HTML5, in-browser Power View.

10. Specifics on Power Map
Visualize Explore geospatial data on an interactive
globe.
Choose desired level of geography from
country, state, county, etc. all the way down
to a specific longitude/latitude coordinate.
Add multiple Stacked/Clustered Column,
Bubble, Heat Map, or Region layers to
better explain measurable data behavior.
Share Present directly from Power Map in Excel
2013.
Share screen captures of completed maps.
Create recorded video tours of data for
easily repeatable presentation content.

11. Power View / Map Demonstrations
Related components on a page interact with each other,
even when viewing the dashboard in web browser.
Microsoft is regularly building out and adding new features via
their O365 cloud offering. For example, they’re currently in the
midst of testing out some newer HTML5 visualizations.
In the HTML5 view, you can extend line charts mapped across a
date/time axis to display forecasted figures.
Pipeline Opportunity Analysis

12. Power View / Map Demonstrations
Power View has some capabilities of visualizing
geographic data on a map.
However, Power Map offers additional layering and visualization
options to heighten any geographically disbursed data
presentation.
Customer Geography Analysis

13. Specifics on Q&A
Ask Use natural language questions/terms to
search for answers within shared Power Pivot
data models.
Interact Change how results are viewed from table, to
map, to chart and back again.
Add or remove data filters on the fly.
Change the data fields shown in the results.
Share Post Frequently Asked Questions for others to
see.
Flag content for review/revision by data
administrators.

14. Q&A Demonstration
Support Team Analysis
Take an initial dashboard concept… …and extend its potential through Q&A

15. QUESTIONS?

16. Onward to Happy Hour!