Tag: Power BI

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.

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January 27, 2016

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. 

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October 21, 2015

Power BI- Empower the User Conference Recap

This year at KTL’s empower the User Conference one of the hottest topics was Microsoft’s Power BI. No surprise here after it was one of the most popular categories at Microsoft Dynamic’s Convergence back in March. 

For those who haven’t heard of Power BI before here is a short synopsis. Power BI is an excel add-in tool made up of 4 components: Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View, and Power Map. Power Pivot and Query are used for data preparation while power view and map are used for data visualization. These tools can take large amounts of data from virtually any system and harness it for real-time, powerful analytics. One of the huge differentiators of Power BI from other analytics tools is that you can combine resources from multiple data centers. Typically, when people want to see the profitability of an organization they look at the financial data. However, this is not always the only factor, especially in today’s world that is driven by technology and social media. 

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July 2, 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

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May 28, 2015

Combining Social and Financial Data for Powerful Analytics

This year Convergence was held in Atlanta. While this conference is a huge Dynamics Users conference, they highlight applications that are not necessarily part of the Dynamic stack. One of the most captivating sessions I attended focused on Power BI, Microsoft’s excel based Business Intelligence tool.

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April 16, 2015

Lovin’ it….. Power BI Designer Preview

Microsoft has a great new offering, Power BI Designer Preview, as part of the Power BI platform.  It is a standalone Windows Desktop application that can be downloaded from the Power BI site.  It is an optional Power BI content authoring option for users that are unable to upgrade to the latest version of Excel.  The application combines Power Query, Power Pivot Data Model and Power View into a seamless experience that will allow users to build their Power BI dashboards and reports. 

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April 16, 2015