Microsoft Business Intelligence

From Data to Insight & Impact: Using Advanced Features of Data Explorer and Building Power View with Bing Maps & Animations

Microsoft BI Team — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:30:00 GMT

After receiving great feedback about From Data to Insight & Impact: Showing Africa’s Progress with Power View and PPI by Microsoft, the Power View demonstration which showed the progress in Africa, we decided to show how we actually built this data visualization.

In this latest video from Microsoft Finance Director Marc Reguera's series, From Data to Insight & Impact, Marc shows you how to get public data from different web sites using Data Explorer, and then how to shape and link the data to build interactive and dynamic views. As you will see, this can all be accomplished while staying in Excel 2013 and without any advanced technical skills.

To learn more about the powerful tools featured in this video, visit the Microsoft Business Intelligence page.

5 Things You Need to Know about the Microsoft Data Explorer Preview for Excel

Microsoft BI Team — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Data Explorer Preview for Excel represents a new way to discover, combine and refine data for your self-service BI needs. If you are new to Data Explorer, here are 5 key concepts to get you caught up on how Data Explorer can fundamentally improve the way you work with data in Excel. With Data Explorer you will:

1. Discover the world’s data

Data Explorer brings the concept of data search to Microsoft Excel. Searching for public data using Data Explorer is easy and straightforward. You get rich and interactive previews of data. When you have found the data you need, a single click will import the data into your workbook.

Here’s an example of a search for “largest cities in Europe”.

2. Connect to a wide range of data sources

Data Explorer supports a breadth of data sources, ranging from simple sources such as text, to more sophisticated sources like Hadoop.

File and text based sources supported include:

Text based sources (plain text, CSV)

Excel files

Access databases

Folders (ability to treat a folder full of files as a single logical table)

Web sources supported include:

Tables on web pages

Web APIs / JSON

OData

Relational engines supported include:

SQL Server, Windows Azure SQL Database, SQL Server PDW

Oracle

Teradata

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Other sources supported include:

Windows Azure Marketplace

SharePoint Lists

Active Directory

Hadoop

Windows Azure HDInsight

Facebook

We are also working on a new set of data sources. If there are data sources you would like to see supported, please let us know.

3. Combine data from multiple data sources

Data Explorer makes it easy to combine data from different data sources. The screen below shows the experience for joining data sourced from an OData feed (Products table) and a text file (Suppliers table)

4. Reshape and transform your data effortlessly

Data Explorer makes it trivial to reshape and derive new value out of your data. Everything from simple operations such as filter and sort, to the more complex operations such as Unpivot are all done with just a few clicks.

The UI exposes the most useful transforms – but you can always use the Data Explorer Formula Language to harness the full power and expressivity of the Data Explorer.

Shown below is a screenshot of the menu of table transforms exposed in the UI. The formula bar that is shown above the table preview lets you invoke formulas and custom expressions should you need to drop down into the expression yourself.

5. Refresh your data anytime

Data Explorer queries are simply expressions that the UI creates for you when you go through the steps to import and reshape data from a data source. What this means practically speaking is that your queries can be refreshed on demand. The query pane has a refresh link that you can click to update your workbook with the latest data.

Give Data Explorer a shot. We think you will like it. If you have any questions or feedback, we would love to hear from you. You can reach us via the Data Explorer Forum.

From Data to Insight & Impact: Getting Public Data with Data Explorer and Building an Excel Power View & GeoFlow

Microsoft BI Team — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Today, we continue our From Data to Insight & Impact blog and video series from Microsoft Finance Director Marc Reguera. The inspiration for this demonstration stems from Marc’s diverse travels and his desire to better understand the crime rate of cities throughout the United States.

In this example, Marc uses Data Explorer to find public data, import it & shape it all within Excel 2013. He then uses Power View to create a 2D visualization, and GeoFlow to create a 3D visualization of the data. Watch below as Marc takes you through this quick and easy demonstration of how you can use these powerful tools to gain insights from publicly available data. Like Marc, in just minutes, you will see which cities have the highest & lowest robbery rates per capita using Power View, Data Explorer, and GeoFlow.

Enjoy Marc’s demonstration and then see how simple and easy these Excel add-ins are to use yourself. The downloads are available here:

Congrats to the Winners of the So You Think You Know Excel Sweepstakes

Microsoft BI Team — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Last month, we asked, “What do you Excel at?” and after thousands of you took the ‘So You Think You Know Excel’ Challenge on Facebook, we have the answer! You excel at rising to a challenge and digging both feet in to have some fun and learn a little at the same time!

We were very excited to see participants from all over the world play and invite their friends to take this Excel 2013 trivia challenge. And while the scores covered the spectrum, we hope that the sneak peek you received at Excel 2013 through this fun challenge got you excited for the powerful simplicity of our new Excel offering. If you didn’t have a chance to take the Challenge, you can still join in on the fun here. Or, you can cut right to the chase and download the preview of Excel 2013 here. Either way, we know you’ll be impressed with what you see!

Finally, we’ve saved the best for last – we are pleased to announce the winners of the ‘So You Think You Know Excel’ Sweepstakes that many of our players entered after taking the challenge.

Please join us in congratulating these lucky winners in the ‘So You Think You Know Excel’ Sweepstakes!

GRAND PRIZE WINNERS (KINECT FOR XBOX 360 PRIZE PACK)

J. Romero (Modesto, CA)
J. Ort (Buffalo, NY)

PRIZE WINNERS (MICROSOFT BIG DATA/SQL SERVER SWAG PACK, ARV US$150)

A. Kravchik (Raanana, Israel)
A. Budai (Szekesfehervar, Hungary)
R. Black, Jr. (Winter Park, FL)
B. Ridings (Cape Girardeau, MO)
A. Rivera (El Paso, TX)
S. Garber (Madison, AL)
D. Harrington (Enfield, Middx)
A. Guennigsman (Howard Lake, MN)
K. Benepal (Slough, Berkshire)
R. James (Brighton, Sussex)

Get the Pulse on the PASS Business Analytics Conference

Microsoft BI Team — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:00:00 GMT

Great things are taking place at PASS Business Analytics Conference (PASS BAC) this week in Chicago, and you can keep up with it all! In fact, this new conference is the place to be for business intelligence and data professionals to connect, with sessions featuring dynamic content from five major tracks including:

Data Analytics and Visualization

Advanced Analytics and Insights

Information Delivery and Collaboration

Big Data Innovations and Integration

Strategy and Architecture

Keynote speakers include Dr. Steven Levitt, professor and bestselling author of Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, Kamal Hathi, Partner Director, Microsoft, and Amir Netz, Technical Fellow, Microsoft. They are joined by a host of well-known industry leaders and expert community speakers, and together, they are poised to make PASS BAC the perfect place for data and business analysts, data scientists, architects and business analytics/business intelligence practitioners to gather and share about important business topics that are changing the way business is conducted today.

Whether you are at the conference, or you’re just interested in following the event online, you can keep up on the latest and greatest happenings taking place throughout week by:

Visiting the SQL Server blog each day this week to read up on the latest news and announcements coming from the PASS Business Analytics Conference. On the blog, we’ll be spotlighting a special three part series on The Art of Analytics, where we’ll showcase Microsoft Business Intelligence strategies and features, in addition to a few customer spotlights that leverage Microsoft tools.

Following @SQLServer on Twitter for conference updates and highlights from key sessions.

New Article Summarizes Support for Mobile Devices Across Business Intelligence (BI) Technologies

Microsoft BI Team — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:00:00 GMT

The newly published article, Mobile Support Across Business Intelligence (BI) Technologies, outlines the mobile devices and mobile operating systems you can use with SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, SQL Server Reporting Services, and Office 365. It includes a summary of feature support, as well as requirements and limitations.

We’ll continue to update the article, as support for mobile devices expands to other Microsoft BI technologies. Mobile Support Across Business Intelligence (BI) Technologies is the latest in a series of content that focuses on mobile BI. Here are additional videos and articles to help you work with reports on your mobile devices.

Exciting Times for Business Analytics

Microsoft BI Team — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:00:00 GMT

With one week to go until the PASS Business Analytics Conference in Chicago, IL, guest blogger and PASS BAC speaker, Marco Russo joins us today to give us his perspective on the dynamic world of business analytics.

Marco Russo (@marcorus) is a Business Intelligence consultant and mentor that has been working with SQL Server Analysis Services since 1999 and with PowerPivot since 2009. Marco regularly write articles on SQLBI and wrote several books about these products, last published are Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model and Microsoft Excel 2013: Building Data Models with PowerPivot. He achieved the unique SSAS Maestro certification, he is a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) and a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP).

We live in exciting times from the point of view of data analysis. Nowadays, the problem is no longer how to find the raw data, but how to handle the pressure of data coming in from so many places. At the end of the day, the goal is always the same, extracting useful knowledge from data. This has been the goal of Business Intelligence (BI) since 1958, when Hans Peter Luhn used this term for the first time. In more than 50 years, the technology evolved, increasing the manageable amount of data and lowering the related costs. However, it always required professionals who were able to create and refresh the data model, empowering end users with canned reports and data navigation tools. A common issue in this process was the gap between people who knew the business and BI developers. In the best case, this gap produced long development times. In the worst case, it led to project failure.

Today, this gap can be drastically reduced. Thanks to Self-Service BI products, if you know your business, you can create a data model without having to ask for a BI professional consultancy. However, a common mistake is thinking that these new technologies are meant to kill the traditional data warehouse approach, i.e. the Corporate BI. In reality, self-service BI is an opportunity to improve the ROI of a properly built data warehouse, even if an optimal architecture might require some adaptation to the data warehouse schema, in order to simplify and optimize the extraction of data for self-service BI purposes.

When we use the term Business Analytics we refer to the exploration and investigation of data. This requires the usage of statistical methods and data visualization, and oftentimes needs adapting the data model. The PASS Business Analytics Conference (PASS BAC) in Chicago this April is the right place to go to learn more about tools, methodology and best practices in the Business Analytics area.

I will speak at the PASS BAC in two sessions about the state of the art in self-service BI.

In the session Self-Service Data Modeling I discuss the challenges of creating a proper data model by using Excel 2013 and PowerPivot. Thanks to the DAX language, it is possible to apply few transformations to the raw data. However, preliminary data preparation might be necessary and users that do not have a knowledge of ETL and SQL need other tools and techniques to adapt their raw data to the required model. I will show how to solve these issues in common scenarios, using tools designed for end users and not for BI developers.

The second session, Modern Data Warehousing Strategy, is about changes in the Data Warehouse architecture and modeling required to face the challenges of the self-service approach and the new demand caused by Big Data technologies such as Hadoop (HDInsight). A good data warehouse is still the optimal starting point for any analysis, but we need to update our strategy for data warehouse implementation to fit the requirements of this new era. What kind of data modeling should we use for the data warehouse? What is the role of data marts? Do technologies such as PowerPivot or Analysis Services Tabular affect the way we should model our data? Do columnstore indexes remove the need for an analytical server like Analysis Services? We will discuss these and other questions, offering an updated approach to the data warehouse modeling methodology.

Look at the many other sessions available in the program and join us in Chicago at the PASS Business Analytics Conference!

From Data to Insight & Impact: Showing Africa’s Progress with Power View and PPI by Microsoft

Microsoft BI Team — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft Finance Director Marc Reguera returns with a new installment in the “From Data to Insight & Impact” blog and video series. After reading a special report about Africa’s progress in the March 2^nd edition of The Economist, Marc wanted to review that progress by using Power View in combination with PPI by Microsoft.

In this example, Marc walks you through some informative data visualizations that depict progress in Africa by examining a number of factors from each African nation, such as population, GDP, HIV deaths, and number of mobile phones. He interacts with these visualizations by simply touching the screen of the stunning piece of hardware that is PPI by Microsoft.

Watch on as Marc shows you how to get from data to powerful business insights and impact using Power View. You can hear more from Marc in person at the upcoming PASS Business Analytics Conference, from April 10-12 in Chicago, where he will discuss From Data to Insight and Impact – Views from Microsoft Finance.

You can also view more videos in the From Data to Insight & Impact series here:

- Building an Excel Power View from a PDF Document -http://bit.ly/WBsMq1
- Building a Manufacturing Summary with Power View -http://bit.ly/XSEOau
- Using Power View to Review Manufacturing Performance -http://bit.ly/VR2Lkl
- Building a Sales Summary with Power View - http://bit.ly/TsKQAo
- Using Power View to Review Sales Performance -http://bit.ly/YmnS0r

Gartner BI and Analytics Summit Recap: Faster Business Insights for All

Microsoft BI Team — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Thank you to the nearly 550 attendees from the 2013 Gartner BI and Analytics Summit who visited the Microsoft booth and joined our “Insights for Everyone from Any Data, Any Size, Anywhere” session at the event. Those who visited had a chance to see our Big Data and BI platforms in action, specifically Excel 2013 (with PowerPivot and Power View), Data Explorer and HDInsight. In our Solution Provider Session, the audience joined in to view a new perspective on the journey from data to insight. Together, we explored what Microsoft is doing to make the data platform and tools more simple and agile to accelerate time to insight so you can take action on your data faster than ever.

Herain Oberoi and Marc Reguera’s presentation sparked a lot of interest from attendees – but also delivered on the notion of having fun with data. Through a fun and fast demonstration, Marc showed attendees how PowerPivot and Power View have dramatically changed his job in finance – making it not only more efficient – but more enjoyable.

You can view additional photos from the event on the Microsoft Business Intelligence Facebook page here.

To learn more about Microsoft and our BI solution, please visit www.microsoft.com/bi. To view the demos from our Solution Provider Session and demos from the booth, please view the following videos on Manufacturing and Sales. Additional videos from this series can be found on the Microsoft Business Intelligence YouTube channel including:

- Building an Excel Power View from a PDF Document
- Building a Manufacturing Summary with Power View
- Using Power View to Review Manufacturing Performance
- Building a Sales Summary with Power View
- Using Power View to Review Sales Performance

Join us at the Gartner Business Intelligence and Analytics Summit

Microsoft BI Team — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Microsoft is proud to be one of the premier sponsors at the Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit 2013, March 18-20 in Grapevine, TX. If you are planning on attending we would like to invite you to visit our booth and meet with Microsoft experts in business intelligence.

Join Microsoft’s Herain Oberoi and Marc Reguera on Tuesday to learn how Microsoft’s data platform, tools and services help organizations empower all employees with the ability to use owned and external data – of all types – to overcome the “big data” challenge and find business insights faster and easier than ever. In addition to getting a view of Microsoft’s new self-service BI capabilities in Excel 2013, hear first-hand how our own finance team is using this technology to dissect data and create immersive visualizations to reveal actionable insights. You’ll see Marc transform raw data into interactive visuals that he uses to wow Microsoft’s business leaders. Attend our session on March 19 at 3:15pm in Texan A room, and enter* to win a Surface with Windows RT!

The Microsoft booth will be open during all Gartner Showcase hours so stop by to learn more about our Big Data and Business Intelligence platforms, see interactive demos, or just to have a chat with one of our experts. While you are there, enter* to win an Xbox 360 with Kinect. One will be awarded daily.

We look forward to seeing you in Grapevine on March 18th. If you have not yet registered visit gartner.com/us/bi and register with priority code BISP1 and save $300 off the standard price. For those not attending the summit, follow us on Facebook and Twitter @microsoftbi to get the latest on everything Microsoft BI.

Last but not least, take the “So You Think You Know Excel” Challenge and You Could Win a Kinect for Xbox 360 Prize Pack. From business intelligence analysts, to big data junkies, and Excel ninjas alike, if you think you know Excel, we’ve got a challenge for you! Join Microsoft Business Intelligence on Facebook and show us how you ‘excel’ by answering a series of 15 questions about one of the most powerful BI tools out there, Microsoft Excel 2013! Enter to play and learn more about the Sweepstakes here.

*No purchase necessary. Open to registered Event attendees. Winners selected and prizes sent post event.