Empower modern analytics and business intelligence data cultures with Excel, Power

BI, MS Teams, and SharePoint

BAB 1. Introduction

Microsoft Excel is an application that has been used since 1985 by over 750 million
users worldwide. Currently, most reports and forecasts are built in Excel by using the
existing capabilities that were developed decades ago.

Excel offers more functionality than you might have realized. In 2009, a new version
of Excel was created to enable more modern analysis, provide interactive business
intelligence, and build a data culture within organizations.

Excel has received two major upgrades:

 Power Query, which is occasionally referred to as Get & Transform due

to its home on the Excel data ribbon.
 Power Pivot, which is also known as Data Model.

Power Query and Data Model are two Excel technologies that have been offered
since 2009, and they have evolved into Microsoft Power BI, which includes these two
Excel technologies. However, Power BI differs in that it also offers you the ability to
publish data models to Microsoft Power BI service cloud for creating and sharing
reports and dashboards.

Collectively, Excel plus these two new technologies and Power BI are referred to as
modern analytics. Adoption of these modern tools will save you time and generate
smarter, more valuable results, providing real benefit to your company and your
career.

Moreover, you can use these technologies in a self-service or enterprise capacity to

improve the way that you work with data.

BAB 2. Benefits of Modern Analytics

You and your organization will experience daily benefits from modern analytics
capabilities, such as auto refresh, nimble response, splice sources, and capacity and
speed. Additionally, these tools provide you with a competitive edge when you are
working with data.

The following sections examine these daily benefits in depth.

Maintaining your existing, traditional Excel spreadsheet reports and keeping them up
to date with the latest data is often time-consuming. This labor-intensive process
results in businesses frequently having to act on stale information while it
simultaneously consumes the analyst's time, limiting innovation and prohibiting real
analysis. Auto refresh capabilities help you keep data up to date without the need for
manual labor. Therefore, rather than expending extra effort, you can focus on driving
data insights, actions, and real business outcomes.

New reports will take less time to build. Frequently, an analyst will spend hours
working on a report and will deliver precisely what was asked for, only to be asked a
follow-up question that might require a complete rebuild of the traditional Excel
spreadsheet. Contrarily, modern analytics will let you answer follow-up questions
with a single click, requiring no time and effort to rebuild. This feature is beneficial,
considering that most people aren't certain about what they need until they
physically see what they've asked for. Well-built solutions that use modern analytics
provide speedy results and near-limitless answers to follow-up questions, and they
empower nimble responses to organizations' most challenging business questions.
Most businesses run on multiple systems. The most valuable business questions are
not specific to one silo or system. For example, answering the question, "What is our
cash flow forecast for 90 days from now?" might require information from CRM,
accounting, and other systems.

Power Query connects to data from disparate business systems and sources to splice,
integrate, and shape data to create data models, resulting in end-to-end visibility
across your business. Traditional Excel was not built to provide that ability.

Modern Excel has near-limitless data capacity. Traditional Excel is limited to one
million rows of data for each sheet but is often slow before you reach one million
rows. When you use Excel with Power Query, Data Model, and Power BI, it routinely
handles tens of millions of rows while recalculating in a fraction of the time. This
capability unlocks usage patterns that people might not consider in regular Excel,
such as loading multiple years' worth of data into a single workbook rather than
starting a new workbook each month. This approach saves you time while allowing
you to perform analyses that you might not have imagined were possible.

BAB 3. Ecosystem of Modern Analytics

Several references have been made to Microsoft Power BI-related tools and
technologies. The following sections closely examine how these tools relate to each
other.

Every solution starts with raw data, which is messy.

With Power Query, you can grab, clean, and shape data for feeding into the data
model. The Data Model feature crunches data into meaningful, insightful metrics and
analytics, and it's used to explore data to drive informed business decisions and
measure impact.

By using Microsoft Power BI Desktop to create a data model and create reports, you
can publish or share those dataset and report assets into Power BI service for
consumption. Power BI reports have a modern reporting and visualization surface
with support for customizing reports and a dashboard for mobile devices. You can
also use the familiar Excel canvas as the reporting and visualization surface with
the Analyze in Excel feature in Power BI, which includes enhanced functions to
access the calculations that are performed by your data model.

This modern analytics ecosystem allows data professionals to create a single version
of the truth solution to empower self-service or to support enterprise scale business
intelligence reporting and analysis.

BAB 4. Roles of modern analytics

Modern analytics roles in action: The tech

It's important to understand how the roles of Power Query and Data Model are
relative to each other. The premise of the following analogy might seem unusual, but
it might help you remember the basic details. Consider a scenario where these tools
are referred to as Sergeant Power Query and Captain Data Model. Captain Data
Model does the data crunching (or analysis), and Sergeant Power Query connects to
messy, disparate data sources to clean, prepare, and shape the data for data
crunching.

Essentially, Data Model creates business value; however, it can't do its job without
Power Query feeding it the correct data. It might be tempting for new learners to use
Power Query as the cruncher and then build most of the analysis in Power Query.
However, we don't recommend that approach because you will miss what Data
Model could have done for you.

Operationally, Power Query comes first. It connects, cleans, prepares, and transforms
data for Data Model. In the current modern analytics landscape, it's best to create the
data model in Power BI Desktop and then publish, share, and consume in Power BI
service, Excel, or even in Microsoft Teams or SharePoint.
Modern analytics roles in action: The people

The technologies of Power Query, Data Model, Power BI Desktop, and Power BI
service have specific roles to play together to achieve modern analytics, as do the
people in your organization.

A published data model represents a certified single version of the truth. However,
you might want to know where the data model comes from. The original author, a
knowledgeable data expert who is familiar with the business data sources, will
develop and design the data model to target key business problems and metrics.

A Power BI admin can promote and certify the data model, empowering other report
authors to find, create, and share reports and dashboards.

Business users will use Power BI or Excel to uncover data trends or other insights to
inform business decisions and drive results.

Consider a scenario where you have a single version of the truth data model for your
finance, sales, healthcare, manufacturing, or other industry business question. This
situation is an aspiration, and it's a possibility with modern analytics by using Excel
and Power BI.

BAB 5. Install and update modern analytics applications

It is best to keep your Microsoft modern analytics applications current and up to
date. We recommend that you use the 64-bit version of Office 365/Excel 2016+ to
provide the best experience.

Microsoft Power BI Desktop has new features and capabilities that are released
monthly. Therefore, we also recommend that you use a 64-bit version of Power BI
Desktop, which you can download from the Microsoft Store, and to always use the
most recent monthly version release of the application.

Microsoft Power BI Desktop is free to download and use, but if you want to create,
publish, and share datasets, reports, or a dashboard to Power BI service, then you'll
need a Power BI Pro, Power BI Premium, or Power BI Premium Per User license.