Power BI Made Simple

Editor's Notes

• #3: Fluff, but point is I bring real work experience to the session
• #5: http://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2013/12/power-bi-for-office-365-requirements/
• #6: Key Points: Companies that make best use of data and analytics investments stand to capture more value compared to companies that do not Data is the new currency—the formula is relatively simple as to how we get our returns on data Talk Track: If data is the new competitive advantage for business, we want to get granular and specific on how companies can derive business value. IDC explored the impact of data on business. After surveying more than 2,000 companies, IDC found that there are two categories of businesses: organizations that have taken a leadership position when it comes to data; and those that are not making best use of data. We learned that the leaders—those companies that embraced data—derived significantly more dividends from those investments in data—from increased revenue, improved productivity, and reduced costs. There is a unique formula that drives this notion of data dividends, or return on data. Data-driven companies focus on several areas: Capturing diverse data: You can no longer just think about what to do with traditional data types. You need to be open to and capable of collecting a wide array of data—including new data types. Utilize new analytics: Logical data warehouses are no longer going to extract and transform new data types. You need to explore new analytical capabilities that are suited to new data types and real-time decision making needs. Deliver to more people: To unlock insights, you need to democratize your data across the organization. Uncover real-time insights: With the rise of the Internet of Things, and the instrumentation of just about everything, the ability to provide real-time visibility across lines of business represents a big value opportunity. At the worldwide level, leaders will capture $1.6 trillion more in value from their data and analytics investments over the next four years compared to companies that don’t. This represents a 6 percent higher data dividend for leaders—an opportunity that exists for any individual organization looking to maximize its return on data assets and reap ongoing data dividends. This means that data really is a new currency of the twenty-first century business economy.
• #7: Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics service that enables anyone to visualize and analyze data with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding. It connects users to a broad range of live data through easy-to-use dashboards, provides interactive reports, and delivers compelling visualizations that bring data to life. Through of the course of the preview over 90,000 companies, cross 185 countries have used Power BI. That is a decade's worth of growth in last generation business intelligence where I have to go get software, install software, get servers, get analysts involved, get all sorts of people involved before anyone got any value, that's a long road from "I want to do it" to "I've done it". With Power BI, this is an enormous user population of people that are now connected with data in a way that was either previously very difficult or for many impossible. Power BI in many ways is a connector between people and the power of the Microsoft Data Platform including data that lives in our cloud, other peoples clouds, or your on-premise systems and also processed by this wide variety of intelligence analytical capabilities that we have - statistical analysis, machine learning, building custom application - all of this technology and the value of converting data into intelligence flows through Power BI.
• #8: Power BI dashboards With updates to Power BI customers can now see all their data through a single pane of glass. Live Power BI dashboards show visualizations and KPIs from data that reside both on-premises and in the cloud, providing a consolidated view across their business regardless of where their data lives. You can then explore their data further by drilling through the dashboard into the underlying reports, discovering new insights that they can pin back to the dashboard to monitor performance going forward.
• #9: Cross-platform, native mobile apps. In addition to its rich Web client, there are native Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android apps that keep mobile users connected with their data, wherever they may be.
• #11: http://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2013/12/power-bi-for-office-365-requirements/
• #12: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-publish-from-excel/ Not yet a way to publish Power BI Desktop to on-prem. Work around is to share .pbix files on local SharePoint.
• #13: Note that Power BI Desktop is an on-prem version, with a companion tool called Power BI Dashboard that is a web version and is available via a “Introducing Power BI Dashboards (Preview) – Try it now” link on the front of your Power BI site.  Power BI Dashboard can use files created with Power BI Desktop.  Think of Power BI Desktop as a tool to create the reports, and Power BI Dashboard as the tool to create the dashboard that contains those reports.  However, Power BI Dashboard can create a limited number of reports on its own against other products (GitHub, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, SendGrid, Zendesk), as well as against on-prem SSAS (see Using Power BI to access on-premise data), and finally it can connect to an Excel workbook (where data can be automatically refreshed from OneDrive). Power BI Desktop combines Power Query, Power View and the Power Pivot Data Model into a seamless experience that will allow you to build your reports and dashboards in an offline fashion and then upload them to your Power BI Site.  It can be used to import and model data, then author and publish Power BI reports to the Power BI service.  You can save the report/dashboard in a new Power BI Desktop file format called PBIX. Power BI Desktop: Realize that this is still Preview, so not all features are in place with this application yet. One thing to note is that we don't have full control over the Data Model. It does provide the ability to add relationships, but that is about it. Also, we are not able to add synonyms to assist Q&A within Power BI Desktop. For Power Query, we don't have ability to Sign-In, perform an Online Search or share a query. These are only available from the Excel Add-In currently. We also cannot cross between Excel and the Power BI Desktop. For example, if we have a Data Model in Excel, I can't use that and create reports within the Power BI Desktop. Also, if I have a Data Model in Power BI Desktop, I can point Excel to use that. You have to pick one or the other. http://blogs.technet.com/b/powerbisupport/archive/2014/12/19/power-bi-designer-preview.aspx Can I add a Power View report (that was uploaded to Power BI Sites) to Power BI Dashboard? No
• #15: Get started quickly. While even some legacy business intelligence solutions provided “connectors” for SaaS services, Power BI takes it a few steps further by providing complete, “out of the box” content packs for Power BI for these services. When a Power BI user connects to their Google Analytics data, for example, they get a curated collection of dashboards and reports that continuously update with the latest data from the user’s Google Analytics account. We are effectively acting as a team of IT, BI and business analysis professionals on behalf of the user. The result is that more people can connect with and gain insight from their data, faster and more simply than ever before. What used to take days, weeks, months or even years of complex coordinated work now happens quickly.
• #16: Demo Power BI dashboard. Demo’s are available at //BI
• #17: http://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2013/12/power-bi-for-office-365-requirements/
• #23: The 32 Bit version can only address 2GB of memory which effectively limits the size of the PowerPivot workbook to about 500-700Mb. The 64 bit version used to be limited to 4Gb file size in Excel 2010 but in Excel 2013 that limitation has been removed which means that the size of the workbook is no longer limited by the software but rather by the physical configuration of one’s machine.
• #24: The 32 Bit version can only address 2GB of memory which effectively limits the size of the PowerPivot workbook to about 500-700Mb. The 64 bit version used to be limited to 4Gb file size in Excel 2010 but in Excel 2013 that limitation has been removed which means that the size of the workbook is no longer limited by the software but rather by the physical configuration of one’s machine.
• #29: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-refresh-desktop-file-local-drive/?session_token=c51557639536eba924a1cf5e993fcea0 https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-desktop-import-excel-workbooks/ Note that Power BI Desktop is an on-prem version, with a companion tool called Power BI Dashboard that is a web version and is available via a “Introducing Power BI Dashboards (Preview) – Try it now” link on the front of your Power BI site.  Power BI Dashboard can use files created with Power BI Desktop.  Think of Power BI Desktop as a tool to create the reports, and Power BI Dashboard as the tool to create the dashboard that contains those reports.  However, Power BI Dashboard can create a limited number of reports on its own against other products (GitHub, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, SendGrid, Zendesk), as well as against on-prem SSAS (see Using Power BI to access on-premise data), and finally it can connect to an Excel workbook (where data can be automatically refreshed from OneDrive). Power BI Desktop combines Power Query, Power View and the Power Pivot Data Model into a seamless experience that will allow you to build your reports and dashboards in an offline fashion and then upload them to your Power BI Site.  It can be used to import and model data, then author and publish Power BI reports to the Power BI service.  You can save the report/dashboard in a new Power BI Desktop file format called PBIX. Power BI Desktop: Realize that this is still Preview, so not all features are in place with this application yet. One thing to note is that we don't have full control over the Data Model. It does provide the ability to add relationships, but that is about it. Also, we are not able to add synonyms to assist Q&A within Power BI Desktop. For Power Query, we don't have ability to Sign-In, perform an Online Search or share a query. These are only available from the Excel Add-In currently. We also cannot cross between Excel and the Power BI Desktop. For example, if we have a Data Model in Excel, I can't use that and create reports within the Power BI Desktop. Also, if I have a Data Model in Power BI Desktop, I can point Excel to use that. You have to pick one or the other. http://blogs.technet.com/b/powerbisupport/archive/2014/12/19/power-bi-designer-preview.aspx Can I add a Power View report (that was uploaded to Power BI Sites) to Power BI Dashboard? No
• #30: Jon Gore: Excel and Power BI desktop are sister tools. If output is Excel, use Excel. If interactive visual report is output, use desktop. Both publish to web. No data prep in web version.
• #31: Demo Power BI desktop. Demo’s are available at //BI
• #32: https://support.office.com/en-US/article/How-to-setup-Power-BI-B3D15D27-2CA1-41D6-B636-1D281168408A This article applies to the previous Power BI experience (commonly called Power BI for Office 365), and not to the new Power BI experience.
• #33: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-get-data-from-files/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-get-started/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-groups/
• #34: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-admin-migrating-to-the-new-power-bi-experience/
• #35: https://support.office.microsoft.com/en-us/article/Add-synonyms-to-a-Power-Pivot-Excel-data-model-345f4f5b-5ec2-4998-bc46-a26bdc0810b6?CorrelationId=f78552f2-c7a7-43ee-b01b-b944fbfb8c62&ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
• #36: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2015/12/01/announcing-power-bi-integration-with-cortana-and-new-ways-to-quickly-find-insights-in-your-data.aspx https://rcpmag.com/articles/2015/12/03/cortana-integration-with-power-bi.aspx
• #39: Monterey Water – operates a wastewater facility that recycles water to irrigate crops. Between the main plant and 25 pumping stations they treat 20 million gallons of water per day. Problem – whenever demand for water exceeds capacity of the plan it storage reserves they need to tap into wells that require enormous pumps that consume huge amounts of electricity. Similar pumps are required to move water across various locations through the facility. Firing up a single pump can cost thousands of dollars. Challenge – analyzing and making decisions on real time data to optimize on energy costs, water processing capacity at the plan, storage reserve capacity, to meet demand. MRWPCA operates a wastewater facility that recycles water to irrigate crops across the southern Monterey Bay region. Between its main plant and 25 pumping stations, MRWPCA treats 20 million gallons of water per day. Whenever demand for water exceeds the capacity of the plant and its storage reservoirs, wells must be tapped, requiring the operation of enormous pumps that consume huge amounts of electricity. Similar pumps are required to move water among various locations and processes throughout the facility. All of this makes MRWPCA a major consumer of electricity that is subjected to certain punitive tariffs. “At times just firing up a single pump can cost the agency thousands of dollars,” says Tom Kouretas, an engineer who focuses on energy issues at the facility. “Trying to understand how best to optimize these processes and stay below peak energy demands means that the agency must understand when we are using power, what the price is on the grid, what the total load is of each process, how to distribute loads among various pumps, and how much the solar production contributes to power availability in the moment,” Kouretas says.
• #40: Connect live to on-premises Analysis Services models Realize the benefits of a cloud based BI solution without having to move your data. With the new Power BI connector for Analysis Services you can create a secure connection to SQL Server Analysis Services from Power BI. When users view and explore dashboards and reports the system will interactively query the on-premises cube to fetch the data using the user’s credentials. With this hybrid solution, you can continue to manage and secure your data on-premises, removing the need to have data reside in the cloud. FAQ: How does security work with the new SQL Server Analysis Service connector? Power BI customers can now benefit from the role level security in SQL Server Analysis Services. The Power BI user name is passed through to on-premises Analysis Services and appropriate role-based security. Analysis Services resolves the user name to an authorized user via Azure Active Directory (more info:: http://support.powerbi.com/knowledgebase/articles/505323-why-you-need-dirsync-to-connect-to-on-premises-ana) and then applies appropriate role-based security to restricted access.   How does data transfer work between Power BI and SQL Server Analysis Services? Data is transferred between on-premises Analysis Services and Power BI through the Service Bus (which uses a secure SSL channel). Does the Power BI connector for Analysis Services add security risk by opening a port on the firewall? Service Bus (which is the underlying transport/relay service used in this scenario) only uses an outbound port  -- it does not require an inbound port to be opened on the on-premises firewall. It uses a shared secret mechanism to create a secure channel between cloud and on-prem.  Will the SQL Server Analysis Service connector work in IaaS as well? Yes, as long as the IaaS VM is domain-joined and Azure Active Directory DirSync is set up.
• #41: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2015/12/22/power-bi-gateway-enterprise-now-supports-live-connections-to-analysis-services-and-sap-hana.aspx https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/gateway http://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2015/01/using-power-bi-to-access-on-premise-data/ http://sqlmag.com/sql-server/how-configure-power-bi-preview-premise-analysis-services-data-sources Note that you are using data in the Power Pivot model in the workbook you uploaded to Power BI and not the data directly on SQL Server (so the Power View report is hitting Power Pivot, so if data changes in SQL Server, that won’t be reflected in Power View unless you setup the DMG to refresh the data from SQL Server as I explain below).  To refresh the data in the workbook in Power BI from SQL Server, use the “Schedule Data Refresh” option on the workbook in Power BI and create a daily refresh (there is no option to update more than once a day).  To refresh the data more frequently, you must do it manually by going to the setting tab on the “Schedule Data Refresh” page and clicking the button “refresh report now” (the status of the connection must be OK to see this button).  See Schedule data refresh for workbooks in Power BI for Office 365. Upload limit: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Reduce-the-size-of-an-Excel-report-on-a-Power-BI-for-Office-365-site-c1a9215c-1c10-4de4-9b7a-50ea6782f8de The report as a whole    can be up to 250 MB. The core worksheet contents    can be up to 10 MB. Excel/Power BI model size (capped at 250 MB when published in the cloud and 2GB when published in Sharepoint on Prem): Info on Power View reports using ASC: http://www.jenunderwood.com/2015/01/20/tip-how-to-power-bi-ssas/
• #42: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2015/12/22/power-bi-gateway-enterprise-now-supports-live-connections-to-analysis-services-and-sap-hana.aspx https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/gateway http://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2015/01/using-power-bi-to-access-on-premise-data/ http://sqlmag.com/sql-server/how-configure-power-bi-preview-premise-analysis-services-data-sources Note that you are using data in the Power Pivot model in the workbook you uploaded to Power BI and not the data directly on SQL Server (so the Power View report is hitting Power Pivot, so if data changes in SQL Server, that won’t be reflected in Power View unless you setup the DMG to refresh the data from SQL Server as I explain below).  To refresh the data in the workbook in Power BI from SQL Server, use the “Schedule Data Refresh” option on the workbook in Power BI and create a daily refresh (there is no option to update more than once a day).  To refresh the data more frequently, you must do it manually by going to the setting tab on the “Schedule Data Refresh” page and clicking the button “refresh report now” (the status of the connection must be OK to see this button).  See Schedule data refresh for workbooks in Power BI for Office 365. Upload limit: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Reduce-the-size-of-an-Excel-report-on-a-Power-BI-for-Office-365-site-c1a9215c-1c10-4de4-9b7a-50ea6782f8de The report as a whole    can be up to 250 MB. The core worksheet contents    can be up to 10 MB. Excel/Power BI model size (capped at 250 MB when published in the cloud and 2GB when published in Sharepoint on Prem): Info on Power View reports using ASC: http://www.jenunderwood.com/2015/01/20/tip-how-to-power-bi-ssas/
• #43: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbidev/archive/2014/12/02/introducing-the-power-bi-apis-for-preview.aspx http://www.microsofttrends.com/2015/02/17/pushing-data-into-power-bi-preview-using-the-new-rest-api-part-1/
• #44: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/developers
• #46: We’re enabling developers to easily add custom visuals into Power BI for use in dashboard, reports and content packs. To help you get started, we’ve published the code for all of our visualizations to GitHub. Along with the visualization framework, we’ve provided our test suite and tooling to help the community build high quality custom visuals for Power BI. All of this is available as an open source project on GitHub. You can also visit www.powerbi.com/visuals to visit our community authored visuals gallery , download visuals and get started.
• #48: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-auto-insights/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-auto-insights-types/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2015/12/01/announcing-power-bi-integration-with-cortana-and-new-ways-to-quickly-find-insights-in-your-data.aspx
• #50: Key Points: View most important metrics in one place by pinning Reporting Services paginated report items to your Power BI dashboard. Talk track: In addition to using Reporting Services on-premises, you can now use Power BI dashboards to monitor the metrics and trends that matter to you. You can harness your on-premises reporting investments and extend it to the cloud. Business users can pin paginated report items to their Power BI dashboards, enabling them to monitor the most important metrics and trends at a glance in one place. The original reports remain one click away, ensuring that people can drill through to the details when necessary.
• #52: Assuming that all the data sources have been moved to a datawarehouse or Hadoop and it is now to build a cube for reporting. There are three choices: Power Pivot, Tabular Multi Dimensional. There are many decision factors to decide which of the three cube technologies to use. Power Pivot is mainly used for quick prototyping of a cube and does not have enterprise features such as role level security, partitioning, etc. On the other hand, Tabular and Multi Dimensional are both enterprise level cubes. The following slides highlight the main decision points. Please note that as new features get built into Power Pivot/Tabular, some of the following slides will need to be updated. There are Four primary tools used to build reports in the Microsoft BI platform; Excel, SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), SharePoint and Power BI Preview Designer. Unfortunately, not all these tools can consume all the cubes. Therefore, the decision of the tool is dependent on the cube and vice versa. Reports can then be published to either Office 365 Power BI or SharePoint OnPremises/Azure IaaS. Currently, only Excel files with Pivot Tables/Charts and Power View sheets can be published to Office 365 Power BI. On the other hand, all the repor types can be published to SharePoint. However, SharePoint lacks Q&A, mobile apps, etc.
• #54: So what exactly is What is Power BI? Power BI for Office 365, a self-service business intelligence (BI) solution delivered through Excel and Office 365 which provides information workers with data analysis and visualization capabilities to identify deeper business insights either on premise or within a trusted cloud environment. With Power BI for Office 365, customers can connect to data in the cloud or extend their existing on premise data sources and systems to quickly build and deploy self-service BI solutions hosted in Microsoft’s enterprise cloud. Power BI for Office 365 enables customers to do more with their data: - Analyze and present insights from data in compelling visual formats either on premises or in the cloud from Excel. - Share reports and data sets online with data that is always kept up to date. - Ask questions of your data using natural language search and get immediate answers through interactive tables, charts and graphs. - Access and stay connected to data and reports from your mobile devices wherever you are. Power BI addresses several fundamental business needs: Enable self-service BI solutions for everyday business users with the ease of use and familiarity of a tool they already use – Excel. Excel is the most widely-used analytical tool by information workers. What you’ve seen in the past are large IT managed data warehouses such as MSS with publish layers and oftentime IT owned standard reports off of them. This is a great model for much of the biz, but can really diminish the agility aspect and time to insights. If an end user has an additional question or wants to see more fields on their report, or connect more data, that’s going to go into the requirements hopper, be iterated on and take longer than desired to deliver. What self service BI enables is that IT warehouse or curated views off the source to be shared out and discovered much more easily and then taken further with the ability to connect to other enterprise data sets and visualize and share in a much easier fashion. So really that speaks to Power BI being an AND scenario for your BI systems. It is not meant to replace large existing warehouse investments, but extend their functionality. Enable organizations to extend their existing investments for on premise data warehouses and operational systems as well as cloud-based data sources and Hadoop clusters to create secure and easy-to-use self-service BI solutions that can also monitor employee access and usage. Enable collaboration, connectivity, scale and governance by offering BI in the cloud through Office 365. Users can easily share their data and analysis with colleagues and access reports wherever they go – on their desktop at work, over the Web at home, and on their mobile device. Manage important data for the team and track usage to see who’s accessing the data and what data sets are most often used.  
• #58: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Data-Model-specification-and-limits-19AA79F8-E6E8-45A8-9BE2-B58778FD68EF