It’s actually wider than the attached screenshot, but I can get a lot of analysis on one screen. Pretty awesome.
PowerBI
Power BI–Let’s Take it MOBILE!–Part 3 #analytics #bigdata #mobilebi
Well, after spending some considerable amount of time with Power BI, I finally figured how to make it purr for me. Something’s like creating dashboards from reports is not spelled out that easily. Or, maybe because I didn’t want to read or watch a bunch of videos. I just want to get my data onto my mobile device.
Right now, you can only use Power BI on an iOS device like the iPad or iPhone which just happens to NOT be my default phone. I have Android which I have been told that it will show up sometime in the near future.
I got my Metrics dashboard to show up on the device. BUT, why don’t I have the cool preview of the dashboard? Must be beta I guess, but the preview would go a long way in helping me know which dashboard to click on. It does show, it just takes 12+ hours I guess for the cloud service to render the images.
Pretty cool. It looks very nice on my device. I tend to look at data from a performance management perspective because I like to compare against my goals or targets.
This feature I really wanted to explore. But I guess I have to have a specific view to actually use it. The view has to be created in Power View to actually use it? I figured I could tap on it and who-la. NOT. Oh well, it is promising though.
If there are specific charts you like when viewing on your device, you can save them as favorites. I like these feature because most people only track 7 things a month and now these are available with one touch.
Email me with questions. It looks promising.
Enjoy, Patrick
Power BI Designer for Windows–Part 2 #analytics #bigdata
Well, continuing on with my quick review of the Microsoft Power BI cloud offering. Today I’m working with the desktop app Designer. Why? Because I just find it way faster to build insights with native Windows apps than via the web browser. When you start the Power BI Designer, you are presented with some help and video files to get you started. I really like that. But who needs a help file…
![image_thumb[7]](https://extendedresults.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/image_thumb71.png "image_thumb[7]")
Diving into the data connections, the designer supports a lot as you would expect from Microsoft. The part that I really like is that the data connectors all have a very familiar interface. What I have been using for years in Access, Excel and SQL all have the same interface. No learning curve.
I really like to do analytics on Social Media so I’m using a third party app called Plus One that allows me to harvest the social conversation into an accessible Microsoft Access database. I love that! I just point to the tables I want to bring in and whola!
Alright, Microsoft rocks. Power Query is the engine behind the scenes. That makes joining my tables and filtering data WAY easier and again in a familiar interface so I don’t have to relearn everything. It is not that I don’t like learning things, I just want to get it done quicker.
Maybe it is me, but I think I should be able to design my table relationships in Power Query and not back out on the designer. I’m sure someone will tell me I’m wrong, but from a data designer standpoint, I want to do it in one place. At least there is auto-detect. 
Getting the data on a dashboard is pretty darn easy. But I guess I’m dealing with beta software because there are a lot of fit and finish features that I would expect. Time Intelligence, Textual Formatting and a lot of things that I would expect because of reporting that you do in Excel today… I want that flexibility product group managers…
There is no PUBLISH button in the Designer which I find totally strange even for beta. You are forced to upload the file through the web interface. I guess that is fine for beta, but I expect that to change in the near future product managers…
Well it looks good. I know, I know. It is beta. I look forward to seeing the updates frequently since this is a cloud based solution. There are a lot of opportunities here because of the pricing model Microsoft is offering. I for one am pretty interested in using this for some of my customers. Part 3 of using Power BI to come.
Stay Tuned, Patrick
Power BI is easy to use and pretty slick. Part 1 #analytics #bigdata
Well, we have a new generation of cloud based business intelligence tools available. You have had option from Qlik and Tableau. Microsoft is throwing it’s hate into the game with Power BI. I signed up to use Microsoft’s Power BI this morning. They have a pretty slick signup process that make it so easy, I think your Mom and Dad could do this.
The default report that comes up is very nice. There is some simple help to get you started. I found the dashboard components very rich in presentation. But that is never enough, how about loading your own data and building your own dashboards?
Power BI supports a lot of different data sources. You can do all kinds of drag and drop building of reports in your browser. But I think I’m going to use the Power BI Designer Windows app on the desktop and then publish the file up and see what happens.
I’m going to pull some data from my Plus One social analytics harvester and bring it in and see what I can do. Stay tuned for Part 2.
Enjoy, Patrick
Who has the most influence on PowerBI? @MSFTNEWS and @CHAMPAGNIE
I’m using PlusOneSocial to pull insight from Twitter on who can influence topics the most. Well mining on PowerBI and I found @MSFTNEWS has the most followers, but @Champagnie is following the most!
Enjoy, Patrick
Who has the most tweets on Twitter using @plusonesocial? #gohawks or #gopatriots at #sb49
There are a lot of different fan hashtags for Superbowl 49, but I thought I would pull tweets on two very similar hashtags for both teams. I used PlusOneSocial to pull on #gohawks and #gopatriots last night and these are the results. Then I used Microsoft Excel and PowerBI to format the results and wola!
I’m actually quite surprised that the Patriots fans are not as socially enabled as the Seahawk fans. But I know for a fact that the Seahawk fans are more nerdy.
Okay, have to go prepare for the game! Can’t wait to watch!!!
#GOHAWKS!
Enjoy, Patrick
PS: Contact me above if you have any questions.
