Design Best Practices to Build Killer Dashboards
When buying real estate
March 2, 2016
Author: Barry Crowell
What’s New with Microsoft’s BI Stack
Microsoft has made a large investment in BI in 2015, both on-premises and in the cloud. BI offerings across Datazen, R, Excel, Power BI and coming to SQL Server 2016 are huge. Microsoft released a public BI roadmap on where they are headed with their BI stack. Microsoft’s simple goal is to put the power of data in the hands of every business user. This simple goal is inline with the #1 top ranked IT priority according to Gartner.
January 27, 2016
Real Time Data Warehouse ETL
To implement my Service Broker ETL API, I started with the basic code/framework provided by Eitan Blumin in this blog post:http://www.madeiradata.com/service-broker-asynchronous-triggers/. He provides a good basic framework for the setup of Service Broker and an explanation of the installation scripts. To learn more on the basic framework and scripts to implement Service Broker please refer to his post.
January 4, 2016
Real Time Data Warehouse ETL (Part 1)
Part 1 – Implementing Service Broker as a Real Time ETL Tool
The cheapest and easiest way to solve the real-time ETL problem is to not even attempt it in the first place, but we live in the real world and businesses are saying that:
· Viewing yesterday’s data is no longer sufficient.
· They need a faster reaction time to respond to threats and opportunities.
November 5, 2015
WOW! A Dynamics GP multi-company Financial Dashboard
Dynamics GP can deploy some great Excel dashboard’s in GP2015 and Jared Hall created a awesome Financial Dashboard that you can download here. The problem with all of these solutions is that most Dynamics GP environments are multi-company setups making these dashboards not very functional without navigating and opening multiple Excel spreadsheets to view each company’s dashboard. So I took it upon myself to modify the one provided by Jared Hall to work in a multi-company Dynamics GP setup.
October 21, 2015
Visualizing your Financial Statement with a Waterfall Chart
In July, Microsoft introduced six new chart types that will be available as part of Office 2016. Today, I’m will show you how to take advantage of the waterfall chart, one of the most popular visualization tools used in small and large businesses by modifying Dynamics GP’s Excel Financial Dashboard with Excel 2016 to add a Waterfall chart. A waterfall chart is a form of data visualization that helps in understanding the cumulative effect of sequentially introduced positive or negative values and is very useful in analyzing an income statement.
August 19, 2015
The future of Power BI looks bright!
In April, Microsoft announced that it had acquired the Datazen mobile BI platform and were adding it to their enterprise BI product suite. This is exciting news that rounds out the Microsoft BI stack and, better yet, it’s free for SQL Server Enterprise customers who have Software Assurance agreements.
What is Datazen and what are its capabilities?
June 19, 2015
Using Power BI to combine Financial and Social Data for More Powerful Analytics
In my last blog post we talked about Power BI Designer Preview and why I was lovin’ it. In this post I’m going to use Microsoft’s most recently Power BI tool to connect to my SQL server instance to analysis my Google Analytics data, Marketing data and CRM opportunities.
Connect to your SQL Data
Let’s get started by selecting the Get Data button in the top left corner and then select SQL Server
May 28, 2015
Get your Elbows Dirty with BI
I love listening to the Kane Show on Hot 99.5 during my morning commutes into the office. So I couldn’t resist using Arnetta’s saying in the title of this month’s blog. When someone calls in to the Kane Show saying that today is there last day at their company they like playing a clip from Arnetta. In my case it’s not my last day at KTL Solutions but a job change within the company.
March 16, 2015
How to Analyze and Report on your Data
Part 2 of 2 in Data Warehousing series
Every business from startup to larger established businesses needs to track details about their customers, products, sales, purchases, social media, website logs to name a few. By extracting, manipulating and analyzing this data you can determine key metrics to help you understand more about your customers and grow your business. In part 1 we talked about how to kick start your data warehousing with BI360 and now we need to know what to do with all this data.
Basically you can use your Data Warehouse for financial statement reporting and analysis, dashboards and data mining. I previously went through how to use BI360’s One Stop Reporting here (link to Part 5 – BI Series Nov 2013) so I will be talking more about data mining and .
February 24, 2015
