Self-service reporting is when business users have the ability to create personalized reports and analytical queries without requiring the IT department to get involved.
There will be some basic work that the IT department must do, namely creating the various data marts that the reporting tools will use as well as deploying those reporting tools. However, once that is done, IT will be freed of creating reports so that they can work on other tasks. Instead, the people who know the data best—the business users—will be able to build the reports.
Here is a typical scenario that occurs when a self-service reporting solution is not in place: a business user wants a report created, so they fill out a report request that gets routed to IT. The IT department is backlogged with report requests, so it takes them weeks to get back to the user. When they do, they interview the user to get more details about exactly what data the user wants on the report and the look of the report (the business requirements). The IT person may not know the data that well, so they will have to get educated by the user on what the data means. This leads to mistakes in understanding what the user is requesting. The IT person may take away an incorrect assumption of what data the report should contain or how it should look. Then, the IT person goes back and creates the report. A week or so goes by and he shows the user the report. Then, they hear things from the user such as "that is not correct" or "that is not what I meant". The IT person fixes the report and presents it to the user once again. More problems are noticed, fixes are made, and this cycle is repeated four to five times before the report is finally up to the user's satisfaction. In the end, a lot of time has been wasted by the business user and the IT person, and the finished version of the report took way longer that it should have.
This is where a self-service reporting tool such as Power View comes in. It is so intuitive and easy to use that most business users can start developing reports with it with little or no training. The interface is so visually appealing that it makes report writing fun. This results in users creating their own reports, thereby empowering businesses to make timely, proactive decisions and explore issues much more effectively than ever before.
In this chapter, we will cover the major features and functions of Power View, including the setup, various ways to start Power View, data visualizations, the user interface, data models, deploying and sharing reports, multiple views, chart highlighting, slicing, filters, sorting, exporting to PowerPoint, and finally, design tips. We will also talk about PowerPivot and the Business Intelligence Sematic Model (BISM). By the end of the chapter, you should be able to jump right in and start creating reports.
Power View was first introduced as a new integrated reporting feature of SQL Server 2012 (Enterprise or BI Edition) with SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition. It has also been seamlessly integrated and built directly into Excel 2013 and made available as an add-in that you can simply enable (although it is not possible to share Power View reports between SharePoint and Excel).
Power View allows users to quickly create highly visual and interactive reports via a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface. The following screenshot gives an example of a type of report you can build with Power View, which includes various types of visualizations:
Sales Dashboard
The following screenshot is another example of a Power View report that makes heavy use of slicers along with a bar chart and tables:
Promotion Dashboard
We will start by discussing PowerPivot and BISM and will then go over the setup procedures for the two possible ways to use Power View: through SharePoint or via Excel 2013.