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BI & Dashboards Made Easy

Bryan Smith

TrinSoft, LLC

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Agenda• What is BI - Business Intelligence

• What is a Dashboard

• What are Power Tools in Excel

• POWER BI• What is Power BI?• Who can use Power BI?• How is Power BI Used?• When can I use Power BI?• Where can I use Power BI?• Why use Power BI?

• Demo

• Next Steps

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What is BI?

• Intelligence – The ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations: The ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment.

• Business Intelligence - A set of techniques and tools for the acquisition and transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes.

• Practical – Knowing what data you need to help your organization make better decisions and having access to that data.

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What is a Dashboard?

• A dashboard in reference to a car or plane concisely displays critical data in an easily visible and referenceable format.

• A good BI Dashboard should provide similar information – it should provide quickly referenceable key measures to help you drive your business. It should contain indicators to emphasize signs of a problem.

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What are Power Tools in Excel?

• Power Tools are a set of utilities built into the Microsoft Excel product that work together to provide data modelling and analysis capabilities. You can use these as the basis for creating dashboards and they are also the foundation of the Microsoft Power BI product.

• Power Pivot – Provides for fast access and analysis of more data than Excel by itself is capable of processing. Includes a programming language called ‘DAX’.

• Power Query – Now known as ‘Get & Transform’ in Excel 2016, provides a query interface and ‘language’ that allows users to combine and refine data from a variety of sources all within Excel interface.

• Power View – An interactive data exploration, visualization and presentation utility that fosters intuitive ad-hoc reporting.

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Power Pivot

1 - Get Data from multiple external sources: SQL, Text, Excel, Web Services, Etc.

2 – Use formulas to create additional columns

3 – Manage relationships between multiple sets of data

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Power Query

1 – Add custom columns to your dataset

2 – Use formulas to update the data

3 – Review the applied steps of your process to edit your changes

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Power View

• Extend Power Pivot by developing creative visualizations. Power View allows you to interactively explore, visualize and present your data.

Power BI – What is it?• A cloud based service from Microsoft that provides tools which allow users to perform analysis and

gain insight from their data.

• It is the evolution of the Power Tools in Excel.

• It was released by Microsoft in July 2015.

• Today you can use Power BI with or without Excel. You are no longer dependent on the version of Office being used at your company.

• There are three versions of the product:

• Power BI Desktop – A windows application that runs directly on your PC

• Power BI – A cloud service that you use through the web browser

• Power BI Pro – A paid service ($10 per/mo) that provides all of the Power BI services plus additional storage capacity, the ability to schedule data refresh more frequently than daily, and the ability to consume streaming data at a rate of 1 millionrows per hour rather than 10,000 rows per hour.

• Both Power BI Desktop and Power BI allow you to perform the same operations with some subtle differences. The two do complement one another and you may use both to build custom dashboards.

• Power BI supports mobile devices and has native apps for Android phones, iOS devices and Windows 10 devices. These can be found in the Apple App Store, Google Play and the Windows Store.

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Power BI – Who can use it?

• Anyone with a browser and a valid email address can use the free versions of Power BI. You must use a corporate email account to gain access. Power BI will not work with consumer email accounts like TWC, Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo. Also, work email addresses ending in .gov or .mil are not currently supported.

• Supported browsers are Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer 11, Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

• Dashboards can be shared by using functions within the Power BI applications.

• Share – Dashboards can be shared with other Power BI users within an organization for viewing.

• Group workspaces in Power BI – Allows users to collaborate on Dashboard designs.

• Sharing with Microsoft OneDrive for Business – This supports the automatic refresh of Power BI datasets and allows co-workers to collaborate on spreadsheets used by Power BI datasets. Files stored locally cannot automatically update a dataset.

• Content Packs – This is a set of datasets, reports and dashboards that a user can copy within their personal workspace. Content packs are also published by vendors to Power BI so you can gain access to preassembled data from partners like Twitter and Google Analytics.

• Publish to the web – It is possible to embed your dashboard in a Public Website.

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Power BI – How is it used?

• The Power BI interface is made up of Datasets, Reports and Dashboards

• Datasets – lists all of the data sources that have been connected to Power BI

• Reports – lists all of the reports that have been created based on the data

• Dashboards – lists all dashboards that have been created.

• User Interface

• The user interface is made up of a navigation pane on the left of the screen

• The central pane is the canvas on which you can build a report by adding visualizations.

• On the right are visualizations and fields

• Visualizations – Offers the entire set of visualizations at the top. The bottom section presents filtering options.

• Fields – Lists all of the fields in your dataset. Icons on the fields include globes to indicate geographical data and Sum icons which indicate totaling for each column will be displayed if used in a report.

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Power BI

Power BI Desktop

Power BI – When is it used?

• Whenever you are challenged with bringing multiple pieces of data together in order to reflect meaningful data.

• If you would like to be able to refresh data periodically to provide the most current information.

• When you need a delivery mechanism for business analytics.

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Power BI – Where can I use it?

• As described earlier, there is a desktop component and a web-based component.

• Power BI is also available on mobile platforms.

• Power BI dashboards can be published to web pages or Sharepoint.

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Power Bi on iPhone

Power BI – Why use it?

• Everyone is busy, why continue to spend hours updating individual spreadsheets.

• Integrating data from multiple sources is tedious and inefficient.

• Big data does not fit in Excel. Even thousands of rows are sometimes difficult to deal with in Excel, Power BI can manage millions and faster.

• It is difficult to publish Excel reports to the users who need it.

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DEMO

Next Steps

• How to get started!!• Sketch out the dashboard you want to see

• Sign up for Power BI

• If not a full dashboard, think through the top 3 items you would like to see out of your system

• Try it out!!

Contact us:

Bryan Smith – bsmith@trinsoft.com

Tara Cox – tcox@trinsoft.com

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