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.
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 →
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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! →
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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 →
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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 →
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Every year at Pragmatic Works some coworkers, including consultants, marketing staff, support team members, software development staff and project management, partake in a company fantasy football league. And with the recent release of the new Power BI Desktop, I thought what better way is there to prepare to completely annihilate my coworkers and friends in an imaginary nonsensical game than by creating some nifty Power BI dashboards based on last years player stats as recorded by Yahoo! Sports. So I thought I’d walk you through some of the steps I followed to leverage the Yahoo! Sports NFL player stats page as a data source and some of the query transformations I applied to prepare the data for reporting.
Continue reading #PowerBI Fantasy Football Player Stats Dashboards for Download →
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If you’re worked in the wide and diverse field of information technology for almost any amount of time, it probably hasn’t taken you long to discover that the one thing constant about IT is that the technologies and strategies involved change faster than you can learn them. And if you work in business intelligence like I do, you don’t have to look very far at all to see change. The Microsoft Power BI team rolls out a software update every month! If I want to stay learned up on the technology, I have to really be on top of things.
About ten years ago when Hadoop was first being developed at Yahoo, Continue reading Power BI and Big Data →
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If PowerPivot, Power Query, and Power View had a baby (don’t ask how) that baby would be called Power BI Desktop Designer. Yesterday the Power BI Desktop Designer was released for general availability, which I promptly downloaded last night at 11:30 PM EST and started playing with. Even as my wife turned out the light and begged me to go to sleep, I persisted! I was too excited. So here’s my first run through (I call it run through because it was late and I didn’t spend a ton of time looking at every little thing).
Download Power BI Desktop
Ok first things first. Download the Power BI Desktop Designer so you can start playing!
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45331
Installing it is pretty straight forward so I’ll spare you the details.
Get Data with Power BI Desktop
The first thing I did after installing the Power BI Desktop Designer was Continue reading Power BI Desktop: My First Run Through →
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With an estimated 500 million Excel users in the world, it’s no wonder that Excel is the #1 business intelligence too in many organizations around the globe. And with the release of Excel 2013, the collection of powerful and flexible data analysis tools built into Excel has only continued to grow. Microsoft is constantly adding new features and functionality to Power BI at pretty fast rate, so now is a great time to start learning about everything that MS Power BI can offer your organization.
Because Excel is just full of a slew of incredible tools, its important for us to understand the difference between the tools, when you should choose each tool, and the Continue reading Choose Your Weapon: Power BI Edition →
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Dustin Ryan is a Data Specialist interested in Azure, SQL Server, and Power BI.
