Power Pivot is an amazing, flexible and powerful business intelligence tool (among other things) and there is no doubt about that fact. As a feature included with Excel 2013 and 2016 (and an add-on for Excel 2010), Power Pivot allows user with a little technical expertise to integrate disparate data source together within a flexible data model. Once the data is loaded into Power Pivot, we easily have the ability to create powerful calculated measures, key performance indicators Continue reading Taking #PowerPivot to the Next Level
Designing a Data Warehouse from the Ground Up Webinar Recording with Q & A
Thank you to everyone that registered and attended my webinar Designing your Data Warehouse from the Ground Up webinar this past Tuesday. And I’d also like to give a special thanks to my good friend, Mitchell Pearson (b|t), for helping me present this webinar. We had a great time!
Also, thank to everyone that tuned into the live broadcast of the webinar on Periscope! I hope you enjoyed the unique perspective Periscope gives.
The good news is that Continue reading Designing a Data Warehouse from the Ground Up Webinar Recording with Q & A
Importing Power Pivot & Power View into Power BI
The Power BI August update just rolled out today (8/20/2015) and in the latest update there’s a lot of cool, new enhancements such as writing custom MDX or DAX queries to access your SSAS data sources, connectors for Azure HDInsight Spark and Azure SQL Data Warehouse (so awesome!), some various UI improvements and a bunch more. But one of the coolest features (and much needed IMHO) is that we now have the ability to import Excel artifacts, such as Power Pivot models and Power View reports straight into Power BI Desktop!
New to Power BI Desktop? Read this first!
Import your Power Pivot Model into Power BI
To begin importing a Continue reading Importing Power Pivot & Power View into Power BI
Power BI Tip: Use a Scatter Chart to Create a Calendar Report
The Scatter Chart in Power BI and Excel is very useful chart for visualizing three different metrics in tandem. But with a little bit of work you can use a Scatter Chart to create a Calendar chart for visualizing your metrics across the days of an individual month.
New to Power BI Desktop? Start here!
To configure a Scatter Chart too mimic a Calendar type report, you need the following: Continue reading Power BI Tip: Use a Scatter Chart to Create a Calendar Report
Refreshing Excel Power Query & Pivot Tables with SSIS and Task Factory
With SSIS 2014 and earlier there is currently not native way to refresh an Excel workbook which include Power Query queries. Now that functionality is rumored to be included with SQL Server 2016 but if you’re currently running SQL Server 2014 or 2012 you are out of luck. But that’s why Pragmatic Works put together the Excel Power Refresh component for SSIS.
Configure the Excel Power Refresh Task in SSIS
Configuring the Excel Power Refresh Task is pretty straightforward. There’s not a lot of complexity to this component, which is a good thing.
First create a Connection Continue reading Refreshing Excel Power Query & Pivot Tables with SSIS and Task Factory
Here’s the New #Excel 2016 Chart Types!
The Office 2016 Public Preview is now available for download! Included in the preview of Excel 2016 are a handful of new chart types and since I’m a huge fan of awesome data visualizations, I thought I’d take a few moments to play around with them and share my experience with you so you can have a better idea of what to expect in the next version of Excel. But to be honest, if you’re a data & visualizations nerd like me, you’re probably pretty excited! Continue reading Here’s the New #Excel 2016 Chart Types!
Cleaning Your #PowerBI Power Query Code
Over the weekend I found this nifty tool called Power Query Management Studio. Someone shared it on Twitter and you’ve probably seen the link to download the tool on technet. Basically this tool is a fancy Excel workbook that allows you to easily clean up your Power Query code and insert it back into your Excel workbook or Power BI semantic model. It’s pretty nifty and easy to use so I figured I’d give you a quick run down on using it to clean up my Power Query code in my Fantasy Football & NFL stats Power BI model, which you can download here. Continue reading Cleaning Your #PowerBI Power Query Code
Twitter Analysis with #PowerBI & Plus One
Earlier this week Christopher Finlan put together this awesome Datazen dashboard using Plus One. Christopher has been doing a lot of cool things with Datazen so I recommend that you do like I did and subscribe to his blog. But Christopher’s cool work with Plus One inspired me to create my own Social Media dashboard using Plus One, as well.
Plus One has created this nifty little desktop application that you can download and install on your computer. Once you’ve set the app up, all you need to do is enter a search query. In my case, I wanted to see what people were doing and saying with Power BI on Twitter. Plus One can only recover the previous seven days of data, so you’ll need to periodically refresh your search or schedule the search, which you can do easily with the Plus One application. Continue reading Twitter Analysis with #PowerBI & Plus One
#PowerBI and #SSAS Tabular: A Natural Fit with the Power BI SSAS Connector
In late June last month, the Microsoft Power BI team released the Microsoft Power BI Analysis Services Connector. The Power BI SSAS Connector allows your deployed Power BI reports to utilize your on-prem SSAS data sources. It’s super easy to set up and can be downloaded for free! And who doesn’t love “free”? Continue reading #PowerBI and #SSAS Tabular: A Natural Fit with the Power BI SSAS Connector
Importing Excel Power View Dashboards into Power BI
If your organization is now a Power BI customer, congratulations. You’re now ready to create some very cool dashboards, integrate disparate and disconnected data sources and take advantage of Power BI’s ability to modify and transform your data, build interactive and dynamic dashboards and then share them with your team and organization. But until you create your dashboards to take advantage of the new visualization types and other improvements, you can easily import any existing Power View sheets in Excel into your Power BI site.
Above you’ll see an example of a Power View dashboard that I will import into my Power BI site. Continue reading Importing Excel Power View Dashboards into Power BI