We’ll show you how easy it is to organize all the data that matters in a single live

dashboard without being a BI expert. And we’ll show the latest in secure access to cloud

data and how you can collaborate, share and stay connected from any

device beyond the browser with our native mobile apps.

So I’m here with resident Power BI expert Michael Tejedor. Now we

brought him on to The Garage about a year ago to introduce Power BI. Welcome Michael.

Thank you Jeremy and thanks for having me back on this new show. So very excited to

be here. we've introduced some great new updates to Power BI since last time we spoke.

Alright so what's new? What's changed?

Well we really are making Power BI a lot easier to use and for people to get started with

it. And we've also introduced new dashboards that allow people to bring data from multiple

different sources all into one spot so they can monitor it.

Great. I think I am seeing that right here, right now. This is the dashboard. This is

right when I log in. I get to see this rich information, not just the list of the models

like I had last year.

That's right. So essentially this is the starting experience. It’s polling data from multiple

different data sources. And here we have live tiles of our data. So this example is: I'm

an organization where I can now see at a top level all the travel spend across my

organization. Here we’ve got different views of that data and

right away we can see that we have a variance to budget. It’s showing me that I'm about

1.4 million dollars overspent. So the first thing I’ll want to do is explore that, understand

where that spend is going and if there is anything I can do to actually fix

it. So I can drill into that tile to an underlying report, and here we've got more information

specifically associated with that particular area of budget and spend.

Terrific, okay.

So if I want, I can actually begin to edit this report. And here we can see we're in

edit mode. I've got the data from my model that

shows up there. I can switch these visualizations if I want. So, for example, I don't really

like pie charts very much, so what I can do is, I can switch that to one of our new visualizations,

the tree map. And here we can see the data in a new way.

Right.

I can open up some real estate here. So let's remove this visualization.

Okay.

Let's take a look at the additional cost of business class travel,

and maybe we want to then apply a filter to that. So I might want to see if somebody's

booking travel within sort of a six-day period of time before they actually leave, how much

that costing us. So I can drag that up there. And see it all touch optimized so it's very

easy for me to explore the data. And now I might want to see, well how much additional

business cost is the business incurring for travel related to, say, training purposes.

So I can click on training here, and we can see that not a lot of spend is for training

purposes. Say for trade shows, maybe I'm going to one of the trade shows. And

then maybe for internal purposes. So we can see here, there's a lot of spend for internal

purposes.

It’s about half the spend, almost, is on internal.

About 1.3,1.4 million dollars.

Right.

So I might want to, at this point, put a policy in place that says, you know if you're traveling

for internal purposes we prefer you travel coach versus business class, so that we can

actually close that gap in spend. Now I might want to start to track this. Once I put the

policy in place I'm going to continue to monitor to

see how we're doing on this particular area. And what I can do is,

I can actually pin that right back to the dashboard. And if you go back to our dashboard

and take a look- I won’t actually save the changes I made to this report- we can see

that that graph is back on the dashboard. It’s live and I can continue to monitor

it alongside all my other data.

This is great. So if you're not an expert in terms of Power BI and creating these types

of dashboards, really once the models are loaded into the system, it's pretty easy to

customize this view then, as we just saw.

That's right. And now, the other thing is, you know, how quick is it for me to get started.

Let me show you some of the things we're doing in the GetData dialogue to really make it

a lot easier for people to get started, you know, monitoring their data. So here we can

see that we've got a number of out-of-the-box solutions. I can see we've got solutions for

say GetHub, Marcetto, CRM Online, SalesForce and SendGrid. You know, essentially working

with some of the most popular solutions out there to build package solutions, so

that now if I go to SalesForce.com, the connection I say connect, I can log into Salesforce.com,

and what PowerBI will do for me is connect my account, create models, reports, dashboards

for me and then present that to me as a getting started place. So it is a lot easier for me

to actually start to interact with data out of the box.

That's terrific. So you just have to use your account information for all the other cloud

services that you have, connect into those and we will be able to create basically templates

or packages that show you all of that data in a really nice way through Power BI. Now

what are the other options that I have to get data into Power BI?

Yes, there are a couple other options here. So for example, you can see that you can use

Excel to connect to data, build some models, built some reports, publish that into this

environment, and then you can build out your dashboards. And those dashboards

remain live. So we've got all the plumbing in place to make sure that those dashboards

still connect back to the original data source, they are refreshable. I've got the new Power

BI Designer, which allows me to build reports, connect to Power BI and publish those reports

out to Power BI as well. As well as new connections directly to analysis services, so if i've

got on-premise analysis services models, I can connect to those as well and start to

build up my dashboards.

Terrific. Can we have a look at the architecture of what it looks like to connect to these

types of datasources?

Yeah, let me actually map it out for you.

Alright. So, you know, to get started with Power BI, it's very easy. Power BI is a cloud-based

service so essentially I can go to PowerBI.com and within minutes I’ve got my Power BI

environment up and running. The next step is really, well, how do I connect that to

data, right? And we're doing three things, three sort of areas, where we really focus.

One is around creating these out-of-the-box experiences for Salesforce.com, for CRM Online,

for Marceto, and so forth.

Okay.

And essentially that allows me to get started very quickly if I’ve got a subscription

to one of these services, and Power BI does all the creation of the models and dashboards

and reporting, to get me started very quickly.

Right.

The other thing, as I mentioned, is, well, I could actually connect to data using Excel.

Of course, last time we did a show…

We did a great couple of demonstrations connecting some data with a bar. And also we've done

this in Barcelona, connecting to data in terms of the El Clásico match.

That's right. So that’s still a great way to get data into

Power BI, right? And we also introduced a new Power BI designer, as well as another

way to be able to build those reports for Power BI.

Now what we're introducing as well is the ability to directly connect to Analysis Services

for a lot of our corporate users.

So hold on. So this is the demarcation of what's in the cloud and

what's online.

That's right.

So this means that, I think you're going to where, basically if I’ve got a data source

on premises. Say I have been using and NERP system, I’ve got other databases that I’m

managing, we've had this for a few years (few decades in some cases), I can connect now

Power BI to those as well.

That's right. So a lot of our customers use Analysis Services to create their models on-premise.

Okay, and how does that work?

Well the way that this works is essentially I'll have Analysis Services models on-premise,

and now I can interactively do a live serve Query against those models on premise. And

none of the data actually now needs to reside in the cloud. So this is very important

for a lot of our corporate customers, who have invested as you said,

a lot of time building out these on-premise models. They want a visualization layer that’s

cloud-based because of all the benefits of having that: the time for insight and solution.

But they don't actually move the twenty-four terabytes of data into the cloud. So the way

it works is every time I interact with the dashboard in the cloud it'll do a live query

down to Analysis Services, and then it will return, it will fetch the data and bring it

back up to Power BI. So none of the data is actually resident in the cloud.

And we are using Azure Active Directory, so every call from Power BI is authenticated

and authorizing just the data the you have access to straight from Analysis Services

in the underlying databases as well, right?

That's right, yeah. So the way it works is that the credentials that I've set in Power

BI, they're sent down to Analysis Services, all the data level security is applied at

the Analysis Services level. So for example if I'm accessing the data I

can see only the data I have access to, you can only see the data that you have access

to. All that data level security is applied and then it's returned up to Power BI.

Great. So we know with the Sass-based solutions, they are in the cloud. And with the Excel

models and the other Power BI tools, those are going to be things reside in the service.

How is performance running in terms of having connections backed on prime data services

through Analysis Services?

So actually the performance is great. Performance across the various

different data sources is about the same. So you saw the

performance in the demo I just did. It's very snappy. The reason for that is actually not

a lot of data flows through the pipe. So if I'm doing a search for ‘who are my at twenty

most profitable customers,’ it’s those twenty most profitable customers

that flow back through the pipe, it's not the the full set.

So all the heavy lifting is being done by Analysis Services before that report gets

generated and viewed through those devices. So, another question I know that we are excited

to talk about is what if you're on the go? What if you don't have something

powerful to view, or maybe a standard web browser, to view all this content? Do you

have a solution for me there?

We do. So essentially the dashboards that we took a look at. Those are all HTML5. All

the reports are a HTML5. So on any device I can access my dashboard and I can view.

Also, what we created are these native applications for the new experience, and the first of those

is for the iPad. So what we see here is the new iPad app. And I can if I want, go into

one of the reports, you can see I interact with one of the different visualizations.

I can go into the underlying report just like we did here and I can explore it. Or if I

see that something's tracking off, I can quickly share a snapshot of that

different visualization. You see it gets embedded in my email and I can send that off to a colleague

with a link to the original dashboard so that they can go and explore the issue in more

detail.

Great. This is exciting stuff. So how do I get started with the new updates the Power

BI?

So you go to PowerBI.com. We're now introducing a new free version of Power BI as well, so

you can sign in to the free version and get started right away. And it takes just a minute

or two to get it up and running.

Terrific. So thanks for showing all this. Of course you can find all this on Office.com/Mechanics,

and all the news on blogs on Office.com every week. Thank you for joining and goodbye for

now.