02 – What Is Power BI?

Chris Webb
chris@crossjoin.co.uk
Agenda
• Short history of Power BI
• Power BI components
• Power BI reporting lifecycle
• What is self-service BI?
• Setup, pricing and licensing
• The roadmap
A Short History Of Power BI…
• The Power BI of today is really Power BI V2.0
• Power BI V1.0 was based around Excel and Office 365:
• Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View and Power Map add-ins in Excel
• Native Excel features like PivotTables for reporting and visualisation
• Sharing handled through SharePoint Online in Office 365
• This was a great idea but a commercial failure
• Power BI V2.0 takes the same technology and repackages it in a way
that is easier to use and easier to buy
Power BI Components
• On the desktop:
• Power BI Desktop
• Excel plus add-ins
• In the cloud:
• PowerBI.com
• What about on-premises?
• Partnership with Pyramid Analytics means you are able to publish to a
Pyramid Analytics server
• SQL Server Reporting Services 2016 will be Microsoft’s own on-premises hub
at some point in the future
Power BI Reporting Lifecycle
OneDrive For Power BI Reports In
Excel
Business Web Browser

Power BI Reports In
Mobile Apps
PowerBI.com

Analyze In Excel

Power BI Desktop Power BI Desktop

Report Designer’s PC The Cloud Report Consumers

Power BI Reporting Lifecycle: Import Data
• The data for your reports often comes from multiple sources and
needs cleaning/filtering/reformatting
• Getting the data into a state where it can be used represents around
80% of the effort of building a report
• Functionality to use:
• “Get Data” window in Power BI Desktop
• “Get Data” in PowerBI.com
• Power Query add-in in Excel
• Build a data warehouse if possible
Power BI Reporting Lifecycle: Modelling
• Data also needs to be modelled correctly for successful reporting
• Modelling can take place inside Power BI, or you can create an external model in SQL
Server Analysis Services
• Generally speaking, Power BI works best with a dimensional model
• Questions to ask:
• Which tables do I need for my reports?
• Should I combine multiple tables?
• How should tables be related to each other?
• Which measures do my reports need?
• Functionality to use:
• “Data” and “Relationships” tab in Power BI Desktop
• Power Pivot window in Excel
Power BI Reporting Lifecycle: Report Design
• Once you have created your model you can create reports
• Functionality to use:
• “Report” tab in Power BI Desktop
• In PowerBI.com:
• Report browser interface
• Q&A for natural language querying
• In Excel:
• Power View add-in – but not recommended
• PivotTables and PivotCharts
• Excel cube formulas
Power BI Reporting Lifecycle: Publishing
• Once you have created your reports you can publish to PowerBI.com
• After that you should:
• Create dashboards
• Configure security and sharing
• Configure data refresh
• Create content packs so others can create their own reports easily
• Updating existing reports is a little problematic at the moment...
What Is Self-Service BI?
• Before you start using Power BI you need to ask many questions
• Who will do the work?
• Analysts know the business but can struggle with complex technical problems
• IT guys can handle the technical problems but struggle with business
requirements
• Where should I store the data?
• A single data source gives “one version of the truth” but is slow to build and
often inflexible
• Replicating data across multiple Power BI files makes maintenance difficult,
slows data import and leads to multiple versions of the truth
Setup: Power BI Desktop
• All report designers need Power BI Desktop installed
• Needs Administrator rights to install
• Make sure you use the correct bitness: 64-bit allows you to work with
more data than 32-bit
• Power BI Desktop is free to use and will remain so
• Install the Windows desktop app if all you want to do is view reports
• Windows 8.1/10 only though…
Setup: Excel For Report Design
• NB Using Excel files as a data source, designing reports in Excel and Analyze
in Excel are different things!
• Functionality varies depending on the version of Excel you use
• Excel 2016 gives full functionality
• Excel 2013 plus add-ins gives you everything Excel 2016 except direct publishing to
PowerBI.com
• Excel 2010 Power Pivot and Power Query cannot be imported
• Bitness is also important: use 64-bit if possible
• Check your edition: Professional Plus is best, functionality varies in other
editions
• Check installation method: Office 365 click-to-run gets new features first
Setup: PowerBI.com
• PowerBI.com requires an Office 365 tenant
• A tenant is a container for all of your organisation’s Office 365 objects
• If you already have an Office 365 subscription when you sign up for
PowerBI.com, MS will try to associate you with the existing tenant
• If no existing tenant is found a new one will be created for you
• Beware: this can lead to multiple tenants for subdomains, tenants in
the wrong data centre, compliance problems etc…
Pricing And Licensing
• Power BI Desktop is free
• Excel can be purchased as part of an Office 365 subscription or in the
traditional way
• PowerBI.com has two levels:
• Free
• Professional, which costs $9.99/£6.20 per month per user
• Power BI Professional is necessary for any serious use
• Power BI can also be bought as part of:
• Office 365 E5 subscription
• Cortana Analytics
The Roadmap
• Power BI changes faster than any other Microsoft has ever changed!
• Likely to remain fast changing for at least another year
• Weekly service updates, monthly Power BI Desktop releases
• How do you manage this in your organisation?
• Future themes:
• Improving report design and management experience
• Improving report management
• Integration with SQL Server 2016 SSRS and hybrid BI
• Development of the API to create a platform, not just a service