Power View color themes: A bane for adopting Power BI

When Power BI functionality first came out for Excel, I was very excited. I still am. I always try to use it as much as I can even to prove simple points. I promote its usage wherever I can. As a techie I find it a great tool; am very fond of it. Others however, look at it from a slightly different perspective: Something that is trivial from my point of view, but entirely the opposite from a business user.

I was recently helping out a project manager build a dashboard of metrics for a client. Data was in Excel, imported from a couple of sources, she needed it mashed up and showcased with a wow factor. This was a chance for me to impress someone with Power BI. So I got her set up with Excel 2013 and all the Power BI add-ins. Then, I taught her to shape the data using Power Query, and build a model in Power Pivot, and finally put it out on a couple of Power View sheets. It wowed her! This was exactly that she had wanted to impress the client with – something additional apart from the services we were already giving them.

Slaughter Analytics – Part 2

In the first part of Slaughter Analytics, I showcased how I performed self-service ETL to pull in and model data from a livestock slaughter statistics webpage. In this post I shall focus on performing some simple analytics through visualizations.

Excel 2013 gives us two more add-ins for visualization, interactive analytics and storytelling: Power View and Power Map. The video below showcases the demo that I used to perform the analysis of the extracted and modeled data.

Slaughter Analytics – Visualization

 

Self-Service Business Intelligence Presentations

For those who are interested, here are the two presentations that I presented at Dev Day 2014 and SLASSCOM TechTalks: Smart Data Engineering on the 17th and 26th of November, respectively.

Serve Yourself: Self-Service Business Intelligence

(Dev Day 2014)

Self-Service Business Intelligence

(SLASSCOM TechTalks: Smart Data Engineering. Lightning Talk)