In this exercise, you will step into the shoes of a business user working in the sales department at a fictitious bike retailer called Adventure Works. You have been tasked with creating a report for the department that will provide a breakdown of internet sales by customer attributes, product categories, and geography. After developing the report, you will need to deploy it to the company's existing SharePoint site where it can be accessed by other users in the sales department.
Before Power View reports can be created in SharePoint, a connection object must be created pointing to the data source, which in this demo will be an Analysis Services Tabular model. This task is typically carried out by IT ahead of time since it usually requires a bit more technical knowledge about the systems' infrastructure than can be reasonably expected of the business users.
However, for the sake of this exercise, we will quickly walk through the process of creating BISM connection file, which as you learned in the previous chapter, is only one of the methods for connecting to a tabular model from Power View in SharePoint.
The following link contains detailed information with regards to creating BI Semantic Model (BISM) connection objects pointing to Analysis Services Tabular models: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh230972.aspx
Follow these steps:
On the New BI Semantic Model Connection page, fill in the values specific to your environment and click on OK to create the BISM connection file. Use the following screenshot for guidance, but keep in mind that the values for the last two fields are specific to my environment. If you are not sure what values to supply for your environments, review the instructions under the Connection Information section at the bottom of the New BI Semantic Model Connection page to determine the appropriate values for your environment.
Now that we have a BISM connection file pointing to the tabular model, we are ready to begin developing the Power View report. Follow these steps:
Sales Report
. Your screen should resemble the one in the following screenshot:The first object we will add to the Power View report is a bar chart comparing Sales Amount
by Country
. Follow these steps:
Internet Sales
table.Sales Amount
as shown in the following screenshot:Geography
table in the field list, and click on the checkbox next to the Country Region Name
field, as shown in the following screenshot:Sales Amount
by Country Region Name
and should resemble the following screenshot:The next object that we will add to the Power View report is a pie chart comparing Sales Amount
by Customer Occupation
by following these steps:
Internet Sales
table.Sales Amount
field.Customer
table in the field list and click on the checkbox next to Occupation
.The next object we will add to the Power View report is a column chart comparing Sales Amount
by Customer Commute Distance
. Follow these steps:
Internet Sales
table.Sales Amount
field.Customer
table in the Field List, and click on the checkbox next to Commute Distance
.Now that we have a few visualizations placed on the screen, let's add a slicer object to improve user experience by providing the ability to filter the data by Calendar Year
. Follow these steps:
Date
table and click on the checkbox next to Calendar Year
.After spending some time testing out user experience by clicking around the report, it is time to deploy the report to SharePoint so that other users in your department can use it. Since we created this report via SharePoint, this process is really easy. Follow these steps:
Sales Report
and will be saved in a document library called PowerView
. This document library happens to be a special type of document library known as a PowerPivot Gallery. As you will see in the last screenshot of the chapter, a PowerPivot Gallery uses Silverlight to provide thumbnail previews of each view in a Power View report. More information on the PowerPivot Gallery document library is available at the following address: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee637430.aspxNow other users in the sales department can access the Power View report by navigating to the document library where the report was saved.
The following screenshot shows what the rest of the users see when they navigate to the SharePoint document library where the report was saved. To run the report, the user can simply click on the thumbnail of the report.
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