Category Archives: Power BI

Excel, Power BI, Power BI Desktop Designer, SQL Server 2016, SSRS

Power BI Architecture Diagram v2 is Now Available

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Download the latest version of the Power BI Architecture Diagram here!

I finally finished putting together version 2 of my Power BI architecture diagram. I previously put together an architecture diagram but as fast as Power BI is changing, v1 of the diagram was quickly obsolete. I always wanted to come back and add more to the diagram to make it more complete but now that SQL Server 2016 is generally available and enhancements have been made to Power BI to facilitate integration with Excel and SSRS, it made sense to do another diagram.

The reason I originally created this diagram was to use as a tool during conversations with my customers. But I’ve also used the diagram in other presentations and found it beneficial while teaching about how Power BI works. I wanted to make this resource available to others for their benefit. So here’s v2.

Click here to download a .zip file with the .pdf and .png files.

Power BI architecture v2

I’ve included a few new things to make the diagram up to date with the latest changes to Power BI, SQL Server Reporting Services, and Excel.
This document includes components to illustrate:

  • Publishing Power BI desktop files and Excel workbooks to Reporting Services
  • Publishing Excel workbooks to a Power BI site
  • Browsing Power BI data models with Excel
  • Publishing Reporting Services content to the Report Server
  • Browsing Reporting Services mobile reports and KPIs using Power BI apps

Feel free to download this content and use it in your presentations, discussions, and for your own learning. I hope you find it useful and if you do, share it with a friend.

Feedback?

Do you have any feedback on this diagram or anything you’d like to see me change? Leave a comment or let me know! Thanks!

Power BI, SQL Server 2016, SSRS

What’s New in Reporting Services 2016

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Today I had the pleasure of presenting to the Higher Ed Data Warehousing and BI Group. We discussed the long list of new features and enhancements included with SQL Server Reporting Services 2016. The webinar has been recording and I’ve uploaded it to YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

If you’d like to download my PowerPoint slide deck, you can do that here.

And you can download my portal brand package here.

Continue reading What’s New in Reporting Services 2016 →

Power BI, Power BI Desktop Designer

Power BI Desktop May 2016 Update Info: Conditional Formatting and Quick Calc

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*Update: The Power BI team has finally published a blog post with all the new features and its glorious! Read about all the new enhancements and changes to Power BI Desktop right here.

So it appears that the May 2016 update to Power BI Desktop has dropped without any notification from the Power BI team on their blog or  a notification within Power BI Deskop. So I figured I’d take a moment to point out of the new enhancements to Power BI Desktop.

New to Power BI Desktop? Get started here.

1. Conditional Formatting on Tables

This one is awesome and has been a feature that we’ve all been waiting on for a while. Continue reading Power BI Desktop May 2016 Update Info: Conditional Formatting and Quick Calc →

dataviz, Power BI, Power Query

Power BI and the Bing Maps API

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This week I was working on a project for a school up North. This customer wanted to use Power BI and map visualizations to view the locations of the various school buildings in the district. The problem for this very large school district was that they were missing the street address information for some of the buildings and for other buildings they were missing the latitude and longitude.

New to Power BI? Start with these 5 tips!

The good news is that Power Query in Power BI is flexible enough for us to take advantage of the Bing Maps API so that we can lookup the missing pieces of information we need. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how you can use the Bing Maps API to look up an address based on a latitude and longitude or use a street address to find a latitude and longitude for the location. Continue reading Power BI and the Bing Maps API →

Community, Excel, Free Training, Power BI, SQL Server, SSAS

What’s New in Power BI Webinar Recording is Available

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Thank you to everyone that attended my webinar with the PASS Excel BI Virtual Chapter today! I’d also like to thank Thomas LeBlanc for having me to present. I had a great time presenting on the newest features of Power BI and what features you will see in the near future. Continue reading What’s New in Power BI Webinar Recording is Available →

Community, DAX, PASS, Power BI

View Getting Started with Power BI and Time Calculations with Dustin Ryan is Now Available!

Earlier today I had the pleasure of speaking with the PASS Business Intelligence Virtual Chapter on getting started with Power BI and time calculations! There were a bit of audio issues on my end but thankfully we were able to still have a great event with lots of great questions!

If you missed the webinar, have no fear! You can still watch the recording right here. Just jump ahead to minute 11 as I had some unfortunate connection issues!

If you have any additional questions or feedback, please leave a comment down below.

Additional Resources

Download my PowerPoint slide deck here.

The PASS BI VC is a great group with tons of free, quality training events! I highly recommend you connect with this group so you can stay up to date on all their great events!

The PASS BI VC also has all their previous webinar recordings hosted on YouTube so definitely check that out!

If you’re new to Power BI, I suggest you start here.

Read more about Getting Started with R Visuals in Power BI

Read more about 10 DAX Calculations for your Tabular or Power Pivot Model (Part 1)

Read more about 10 DAX Calculations for your Tabular or Power Pivot Model (Part 2)

Feedback

I hope you enjoyed the webinar and that you maybe even learned a little something. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please leave it down below! Thanks for reading and watching!

Community, Power BI, Power BI Desktop Designer, Rstats, SQL Server, SQL Server 2016, TSQL

Microsoft & R Programming Session Materials & Resources Available

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Last Thursday night I had the pleasure of speaking with Gregory Kramer and his friends at the Madison, WI Power BI User Group. We took an introductory look at how Microsoft’s acquisition of Revolution Analytics is making serious waves across the Microsoft data platform. We also walked through leveraging R in Power BI and SQL Server 2016.

New to R & Power BI? Start here.

R visuals in Power BI

Continue reading Microsoft & R Programming Session Materials & Resources Available →

Dashboard Design, Power BI, Power BI Desktop Designer

Download the Power BI Architecture Diagram

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Download the latest version of the Power BI Architecture Diagram here!

As a Data Platform Solution Architect for Microsoft, one of my jobs is to help teach my customers what our amazing tools can do and how those tools work. Interest in Power BI is blowing up and I’m seeing most of my customers express huge interest in this awesome tool. To help facilitate the conversation about how Power BI works and how it can help my customers, I put together this diagram.

Also, each text block in the black area to the right includes a link to the documentation on PowerBI.com for the specific component. So if I’m looking at the diagram and I want to gather more information on the Power BI Gateway – Enterprise, just click the text block or point #2. Continue reading Download the Power BI Architecture Diagram →

Azure, dataviz, Power BI, Power BI Desktop Designer, Rstats

Getting Started with R Visuals in Power BI

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Thanks to the December 2015 update released for Power BI, we can now use R to visualize our data in Power BI! Make no mistake, this is huge news and in this blog post I want to walk you through how to use the new R Script Visualization in Power BI and get you started with using R to create your first visualizations.

Read These Top 5 Power BI Tips

Not only can we create and download custom visuals from PowerBI.com to extend the capabilities of Power BI, we can use R to create a ridiculous amount of powerful visualizations. If you can get the data into Power BI, you can use R to perform interesting statistical analysis and create some pretty cool, interactive visuals.

Getting Started

If you’re new to R, like myself, R is a programming language for statistical data analysis. The R programming language is Continue reading Getting Started with R Visuals in Power BI →

Azure, Azure ML, Excel, Power BI, Power BI Desktop Designer, Power Query

Sentiment Analysis & Key Phrase Detection w/ Power Query & Power BI

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Recently I worked on a neat little POC with Patrick Leblanc for a customer in Education who wished to perform sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction on surveys completed by students regarding classes and instructors, which brings me to this blog post.

Using Azure ML and a free subscription to the Text Analytics API, I’m going to show you how to perform sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction on Continue reading Sentiment Analysis & Key Phrase Detection w/ Power Query & Power BI →