Presented to The Ottawa IT Community Meetup Group (Ottawa SQL - PASS Chapter) on Thursday September 19
Powerful Self-Service BI in Excel 2013 - Data search and discovery with Power Query (formerly "Data Explorer"), analyzing and modeling with Power Pivot, visualizing and exploring with Power View and Power Map (formerly codename "GeoFlow")
1. Power BI
Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, Power Map
Stéphane Fréchette
Thursday Septembre 19, 2013
2. Who am I?
My name is Stéphane Fréchette
I’m a Database & Business Intelligence Professional and Founder | CEO of
I have a passion for architecting, designing and building solutions that matter.
Self proclaimed Open Data Hacker/Advocate I founded Gatineau Ouverte a citizen led
initiative which aims to promote open access to civic data of the city of Gatineau.
Twitter: @sfrechette
Blog: stephanefrechette.com
Email: stephanefrechette@ukubu.com
3. Session Outline
• Microsoft Business Intelligence (The Stack)
• Self-Service Business Intelligence in Excel – Power BI
• Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View, Power Map
• Demos
• Power BI for Office 365
• Power BI Sites
• Data Management
• Power BI for Mobile
• Summary
• Resources
7. Self-Service BI in Excel 2013
• Excel delivers powerful, intuitive capabilities for self-service BI
Power Query (codename Data Explorer)
Power Pivot (previously PowerPivot)
Power View
Power Map (codename GeoFlow)
(That’s A Lot of Power!)
8. Power Query
Power Query Preview for Excel is an add-in that enhances the self-service Business
Intelligence experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery and access.
Enable self-service data discovery, query, transformation and mashup experiences for
Information Workers, via Excel and Power Pivot
• Discovery and connectivity to a wide range of data sources, spanning volume as well as
variety of data.
• Highly interactive and intuitive experience for rapidly and iteratively building queries over
any data source, any size.
• Consistency of experience, and parity of query capabilities over all data sources.
• Joins across different data sources; ability to create custom views over data that can then
be shared with team/department.
9. 9
Access and mashup data from virtually any source to create powerful reports
Power Pivot
10. Power Pivot
• Power Pivot enriches Excel by compressing storage and provide fast querying
and reporting from tabular data
• xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (formerly VertiPaq)
• Highlights;
• Load data from a variety of sources
• Extremely large volumes can be stored
• Data Analysis Expressions (DAX)
• Can be enriched with Hierarchies, KPIs, Perspectives and Reporting metadata
• First introduced as an add-in with SQL Server 2008 R2
11. Power Pivot – Key New Features
• No longer requires separate install add-in
• Basic data model functionality now built in Excel 2013
• Calculated fields (‘Measures’) created automatically when field is numeric
• In-memory analytics engine native to Excel
• Excel and PowerPivot now have a single, uniform Field List
• Data categorization and suggestions from DataMarket
• Support for more languages (40 languages)
• Support for larger file sizes in 64-bit Excel (*unlimited)
13. Power View
• Power View provides an interactive data exploration, visualization and
presentation experience
• Strong visual design experience (WYSIWYG)
• Rich meta-driven interactions
• First introduced with SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services in SharePoint Mode
(BI and Enterprise editions)
• Now part of Excel 2013 (need to enable add-in)
• Power View sheets can be added to Workbook
• Can be based on a Workbook Data Model, or SSAS Tabular Data Model,
*SSAS Multidimensional Model (SQL Server 2012 SP1 CTP3)
• Requires Silverlight 5 to be installed
14. Power View – Key New Features
• Power View sheets can connect to different data models in one workbook
• Modify the internal Data Model without leaving the Power View sheet
• Power View in Excel Services, Excel Web App and Office 365
• SharePoint Server
• Pie charts
• Maps
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Hierarchies
• Drill up and drill down
• Hyperlinks
15. Power Map
Power Map Preview for Excel 2013 allows you to plot geographic and temporal data
visually, analyze that data in 3D, and create interactive tours to share with others.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38395
*Requires Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 or Office 365 ProPlus.
17. Power BI for Office 365
• Power BI Sites
• Quickly create a collaboration hub to share workbooks. Create, and enable users to
take full advantage of the Power BI for Office 365 collection of online offerings.
• A Visual Home for Workbooks
• Large Workbooks – up to 250MB
• Sites without Power BI are limited to 10MB
• Share Your Work
• Built-in from the beginning
• Share Power Query (queries)
• Manage Data
• Track and analyze share queries and data sets
• Go anywhere with the Power BI App
19. Summary
Self-service BI in Excel, Power BI provides the tools you need to find
data, shape and filter it how you want, model it, and visualize it.
20. Resources
• Power BI for Office 365
https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/power-bi-FX104080667.aspx
Register and read the Power BI – Getting Started Guide
• PowerPivotPro http://www.powerpivotpro.com/
• Analysis Services & PowerPivot Blog (MSDN) http://blogs.msdn.com/b/analysisservices/
• Kasper de Jonge PowerPivot Blog http://www.powerpivotblog.nl/
• Chris Webb’s BI Blog https://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/category/powerpivot/
• SQLBI – Marco Russo http://www.sqlbi.com/
• PowerPivot-info.com http://powerpivot-info.com/