Beginning Power BI with Excel 2013: Self-Service Business Intelligence Using Power Pivot, Power View, Power Query, and Power Map

Understanding your company’s data has never been easier than with Microsoft’s new Power BI package for Excel 2013. Consisting of four powerful tools—Power Pivot, Power View, Power Query and Power Maps—Power BI makes self-service business intelligence a reality for a wide range of users, bridging the traditional gap between Excel users, business analysts and IT experts and making it easier for everyone to work together to build the data models that can give you game-changing insights into your business.

Beginning Power BI with Excel 2013 guides you step by step through the process of analyzing and visualizing your data. Daniel R. Clark, an expert in BI training and a regular speaker on these topics, takes you through each tool in turn, using hands-on activities to consolidate what you’ve learned in each chapter.

Starting with Power Pivot, you will create robust scalable data models which will serve as the foundation of your data analysis. Once you have mastered creating suitable data models, you will use them to build compelling interactive visualizations in Power View. It’s often necessary to combine data from disparate sources into a data model. Power Query allows you to easily discover, combine, and refine data from a variety of sources, so you can make accurate judgments with all the available information. Geographical awareness is another common requirement of data analysis. Using Power Maps you will create captivating visualizations that map your data in space and time.

Beginning Power BI with Excel 2013 is your practical guide to getting maximum insight from your data, and presenting it with impact.

What you’ll learn

• Import data from a range of sources into the Power Pivot Model
• Create solid data models to support data analysis
• Create compelling dashboards in Excel
• Use Power View to create robust Interactive Data Presentations
• Simplify data discovery, association and cleansing with Power Query
• Combine analytical and geographic data in powerful 3D visualizations using Power Maps

Who this book is for

Beginning Power BI with Excel 2013 is for business analysts, database administrators and developers who need to work together to analyze and interpret their company’s data. Good modeling design and the necessary coding will be covered in an accessible way for those without a specialist background in these areas.

About the Author

Dan Clark is a senior business intelligence (BI)/programming consultant specializing in Microsoft technologies. He is focused on learning new BI/data technologies and on training others how to best implement the technology. Dan has published several books and numerous articles on .NET programming and BI development. He is a regular speaker at various developer/database conferences and user group meetings and enjoys interacting with the Microsoft developer and database communities. In a previous life, he was a physics teacher; he is still inspired by the wonder and awe of studying the universe and figuring out why things behave the way they do.