Empower your Business Information

In early January as I was finishing my Xmas holidays I spotted that Microsoft were holding a competition to promote the latest release of Microsoft Power BI.

Why did this announcement get me excited

The competition was intended to showcase a number of newly released features for the Microsoft suite of software which is collectively known as Power Bi.  These features can start to bridge the huge management information resource gap and provide businesses of all sizes a fast introduction into the world of Business Intelligence. The new features offer the following "utopian" ideals

• The ease and power (excuse the pun) of processing large sets of management and publicly available information is now even more accessible to the business users who understand the data and the insights these can provide. This is within an all too familiar tool, I am of course referring to Microsoft Excel.
• The latest visualisations now provide you with the ability to gain insights, you could never simply achieve with tables of figures, via synchronised multi-facetted graphs, moving bubble charts and animated maps which are as alive as your data. 
• The cloud offering of Power BI means a significantly lower TCO for a corporate based data repository and the Q&A feature is just simply inspiring
• The second impressive feature of the cloud Power BI, is the ease by which you can connect and share data from both internal and external sources so that everyone in your organisation has a common source of data. The single source of the truth now exists in personal BI.
• And my technology favourite is the fact it continues to showcase the in-memory tabular technology which by all accounts it surpasses older technologies on speed and ease of use.

The Power BI tools are not just the domain of the personal space, as these technologies mirror themselves into the Microsoft SQL Tabular Analytical Services and SharePoint Enterprise Server technologies. These are also starting to be embedded into the Microsoft Dynamics Business Suite and should be seen as a key enabler for businesses.

The competitions spurred me on to invest some of my time 

So this competition resulted in committing 3 weeks of work to find the data, build the Power BI solution and educate myself in video editing practices. And the outcome of my 3 weeks of effort was the following presentation.

My intention for this blog is to point more people into the right direction, to research this technology, and hopefully get you as enthused as I am about Power BI (and I am clearly not able to hide this by now).

Microsoft Power BI introduction

As a way of an intro, Power BI is in essence 3 tiers of technology

• The presentation tier is achieved via SharePoint 365 and Microsoft Excel
• The visual parts within Excel are called Pivot tables, Power View and Power Map. Excel is used as a container to aggregate all these visuals and is required to construct these. As a minimum you require a single Excel Standard licence or an Office 365 licence. Please note that the more advanced the version of Excel the more features become available.
• SharePoint 365 is used to store the Excel Power BI spreadsheets, secure them and render these without the end user requiring their own Excel licence. SharePoint 365 and Power BI requires a monthly subscription fee.
• The visuals can also be shown on Microsoft tablets via the Microsoft Power BI Windows 8 App, which connects to the aforementioned SharePoint 365 site. This app is currently free.
• The second tier, the data processing engine for Power BI is achieved within the Excel Power Pivot engine.
• Calculations constructed within Power Pivot language (DAX) or Excel, extend your ability to interrogate the raw data. Power Pivot also allows you to create visual KPIs.
• SharePoint 365 Power BI adds a cloud engine, as well as a Q&A feature, to enable users to interrogate the data online.
• The third tier, the data, is imported into Excel using data connections
• The Power Query add-in is an advanced Transformation and Load data tool, which can import data from a multitude of data sources from SQL to Facebook
• Data is stored in Excel Tables or within the Power Pivot Data Model and can accommodate millions of rows of data with ease.

Where to start with Microsoft Power BI

To get to grips with these 3 tiers you should start with the items below

1. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerbi/ as this not only provides you with lots of information it also lets you start a free trial of Power BI 365 together with the appropriate SharePoint 365 site and licence for Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus.
2. Secondly look for Power Query and Power Map for Excel and install these add-ins. Personally these are relatively easy to navigate and use, but there is plenty of help online to assist you in learning these. http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/excel-help/microsoft-power-query-for-excel-help-HA104003813.aspx
3. Start by looking through the Power BI blogs and of course the competition to find out more examples of what is possible. Start here http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2013/07/07/getting-started-with-pq-and-pm.aspx
4. Once you get comfortable with the above I highly recommend you start to explore Power View to visualise your data http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/excel-help/create-a-power-view-sheet-in-excel-2013-HA102899553.aspx. I really recommend you view Amir Netz and his entertaining way he first introduced Power View  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5fwphWxNoE
5. Second but not least look into Power Pivot starting with this article http://blogs.office.com/2012/12/13/introduction-to-powerpivot-in-excel-2013/ and move on with the links at the bottom of that article
6. And finally once you get accustomed to the basics you will start wondering about DAX and for this I highly recommend looking out for Kasper de Jonge, Alberto Ferrari and Marco Russo. These individuals have been inspirational to myself so far. I have not included links for these as this area require a process of discovery from blogs, articles, seminars, videos on YouTube, books and even training courses.

Have fun learning.