Introduction

Business intelligence (BI) is a concept that has been around for many years. Until recently, it has too often been a domain reserved for large corporations with teams of dedicated IT specialists. All too frequently, this has meant developing complex solutions using expensive products on timescales that did not meet business needs.

All this has changed with the advent of self-service business intelligence. Now a user with a reasonable knowledge of Microsoft Excel can leverage their skills to produce their own analyses with minimal support from central IT. Then they can deliver their insights to colleagues safely and securely via the cloud.

This democratization has been made possible by four Excel add-ins that combine to revolutionize the way in which data is discovered, captured, structured, and shaped so that it can be sliced, diced, chopped, queried, and presented in an interactive and intensely visual way.

The four Excel add-ins that together make up the Excel BI toolkit are these:

• Power Query—to find and load external data
• PowerPivot—to design a coherent data model for analysis
• Power View—to present your findings visually and interactively
• Power Map—to display insights with a geographical slant

They are completed by Power BI—a simple way of sharing your analyses and insights on PCs and mobile devices from the Microsoft cloud.

Some of these tools (Power Query and Power Map, for instance) are relatively new. Others, such as Power View, have been around as part of SharePoint for a short while. PowerPivot, indeed, has been a dependable Excel add-in for four years or so. Yet it is when these elements are integrated that their combined strengths take business intelligence to a whole new level. When used together, these tools empower the user as never before. They provide you with the capability to analyze and present your data and to shape and deliver your results easily and impressively. All this can be achieved in a fraction of the time that it would take to specify, develop, and test a corporate solution. To cap it all off, self-service BI produces reports at a fraction of the cost of more traditional solutions, with far less rigidity and overhead.

The aim of this short book is to introduce the reader to the brave new world of self-service business intelligence. This will involve a complete tour of the Excel BI toolkit and Power BI. Although it assumes a basic knowledge of Excel, this book presumes that you have little or no knowledge of the Microsoft self-service business intelligence suite of products. These tools are therefore explained from the ground up. The aim is, nonetheless, to provide the most complete coverage possible of each facet of the entire Microsoft self-service BI toolkit, and the way in which its components work together to deliver user-driven business intelligence. Hopefully if you read the book and follow the examples given, you will arrive at a level of practical knowledge and confidence that you can subsequently apply to your own BI requirements.

This book should prove invaluable to business intelligence developers, Excel power users, IT managers, and finance experts—indeed anyone who wants to deliver efficient and practical business intelligence to their colleagues. Whether your aim is to develop a proof of concept or to deliver a fully-fledged BI system, this book can, hopefully, be your guide and mentor.

Although you can read this book from start to finish, it is not designed to be a progressive self-tutorial. The Microsoft self-service BI suite consists of multiple tools that can be used completely independently, and so the same applies to this book. Consequently, you are free to dip only into the chapters that cover the aspect of the self-service BI suite that interests you. You can consider this book as consisting of five independent parts, each of which you can read without needing any of the others. Each part covers one aspect of the self-service BI product suite. These five parts map to the following chapters:

• Power View—Chapters 2 through 8
• PowerPivot—Chapters 9 through 11
• Power Query—Chapters 12 and 13
• Power Map—Chapter 14
• Power BI—Chapter 15

This book comes with a small sample data set that you can use to follow the examples that are provided. It may seem paradoxical to use a tiny data sample when explaining a product suite that is capable of analyzing medium and large data sets. However, I prefer to use an extremely simplistic data structure so that the reader is free to focus on the essence of what is being explained, and not the data itself.

Inevitably, not every question can be answered and not every issue can be resolved in one book. I truly hope that I have answered many of the essential self-service BI questions that you will face and have provided ways of solving a reasonable number of the challenges that you may encounter.

I wish you good luck in using the Microsoft self-service business intelligence suite to prepare and deliver your insights. And I sincerely hope that you have as much fun with it as I had writing this book.

—Adam Aspin