Tag: Power BI

In the last year, Power BI has been on a mission to empower every individual, team, and organization to seamlessly infuse data into their work in Microsoft Teams. We’re excited to announce we’re embarking on the next chapter of this effort by extending these experiences into Outlook and Office. In this blog we’ll share what you can expect, how to get ready, and the high-level timelines for when it will roll-out to users.

Note: The roll-out of these new capabilities has started for users enrolled in Microsoft 365 Targeted Release and Office Insiders programs. Outlook for Windows needs to be installed from the Beta Channel. The experiences are rolling out gradually. If you don’t see it in your Outlook or Office experiences don’t worry it has simply not been enabled for you yet. Learn more.

The value of using data everywhere you work, now in Outlook and Office

We’ve already seen how valuable adding Power BI to Microsoft Teams is to enable everyone in an organization to participate in a data culture.

Data culture is simply the practice of using data on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to generate impact. This is easier when up to date and trustworthy data is always one click away right where you already work.

Now, we’re starting to bring these highly engaging experiences to Outlook and Office. Outlook for Windows, Outlook Web Access (OWA) and Office.com are some of the most used tools by information workers today.

By providing experiences in Outlook and Office.com, users can focus more on their tasks, experience fewer expensive context switches, and find data at their fingertips in the flow of their work.

Importantly, organizations are empowered to distribute authoritative, trustworthy, and governed datasets even more broadly to their workforce. This accelerates efforts to build one source of truth in Power BI. It’s a critical step since data culture works best when everyone participates, no matter their skill level, their job role, or their seniority in the organization.

Using Power BI in Outlook

Email is a fundamental productivity tool for most workers. The Power BI app is becoming available in Outlook for Windows and Outlook for the Web (OWA). We’ll refer to both as Outlook.

In Outlook you’ll find Power BI in the apps list and open the same fully featured and highly interactive experience as you see in Microsoft Teams.

When you write or reply to emails, you’ll also have the messaging extension. This lets you quickly answer questions with rich cards. With a built-in recently viewed items experience and search, it helps you find and share data when replying to emails. In a future update, links you paste in Outlook email will be transformed into these cards as well (sometimes called unfurling).

Using Power BI in Office

Office.com is a launch point for your work. It brings together content, activity, and now apps to help you complete tasks and stay focused. Naturally, the Power BI app is becoming available in Office.com as well.

In Office, you’ll find Power BI in the apps list and open the same fully featured and highly interactive experience as you see in Microsoft Teams.

On the Create page, you’ll find a fast way to jump start your report creation in Power BI alongside other core productivity tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

How do I get these experiences?

During the preview period, the experiences are rolling out using Microsoft 365 Targeted Release program and the Office Insiders program.

To try the experiences, join Microsoft 365 Targeted Release to try the Power BI app for Outlook for the web and Office.com. To try the experiences in Outlook for Windows, join the Office Insiders program and install Outlook for Windows from the Beta Channel.

The apps experiences in Outlook and Office will roll-out progressively. With the initial release, 20% of users will have the capability. It will roll-out to all users in Targeted Release and Beta Channel in the coming months.

The Power BI app for Teams, Outlook, and Office is a single app. If you have the app installed in Microsoft Teams, it will automatically be available to you in Outlook and Office once the experiences roll-out to you. Additionally, if you install the app from the store experience in Outlook or Office, it will appear in all three experiences.

The Power BI app in Outlook and Office is governed by Teams Admins and Power BI Admins. Teams Admins can allow the Power BI app using Teams Admin center. The Power BI Admin can choose how the app is promoted and installed from the Power BI service using Power BI admin settings. These control points also control the app in all three experiences. It is not possible to allow the app in Teams but not allow it in Outlook or Office.

How to: Set up the Standard or Targeted release options – Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Docs

How to: Join the Office Insider Program (microsoft.com)

What are the differences between the Power BI app in Teams, Outlook, and Office?

In short, it’s the same app with the same planned capabilities. The Power BI app for Microsoft Teams is in General Availability and continues to be fully supported for production use. All its capabilities are available today.

The Power BI app is in preview in Outlook and Office. There are several experiences, most notably export, file download, and the paste or enter data manually options that are coming soon. There are plans in place to enable all these features in the coming weeks and months. If you need these features, just use the globe icon to open the item in the web browser and complete your task.

The Power BI app is the same across Teams, Outlook, and Office. The app is installed and updated from a single unified Office store. This means that users who have the Power BI app installed in Teams will also see that app in their Outlook and Office.

We’re looking for feedback!

As we release this preview of the Power BI app in Outlook and Office, we’re excited to hear from you how you’d like these experiences to evolve. Leave a comment or head over to https://ideas.powerbi.com to leave a feature suggestion.

Next steps

Microsoft Teams apps designed for Microsoft 365 coming to Office and Outlook

Ignite 2021: Building apps for collaboration in a hybrid world – Microsoft 365 Developer Blog

Manage access to Teams apps across Microsoft 365 – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

Set up the Standard or Targeted release options – Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Docs

Join the Office Insider Program (microsoft.com)

In an era rife with hacked campaigns, bots and election interference, one news organization has returned to an age-old maxim: Every vote truly does count. And they’re using data to prove it to readers.

Politico Europe, a joint venture between the American media organization Politico and German publisher Axel Springer, unveiled an election-coverage hub ahead of the 2019 European parliamentary votes held in May. It gives citizens a deeper look at the democratic process and allows them to connect their top issues with candidates in the field.

Now called Poll of Polls, the platform offers interactive data visualizations built with Microsoft Power BI. It also provides political news stories and analyses of votes cast during elections within each of the 28 member states of the European Union.

Launched in collaboration with Microsoft, the site aims to show readers how their individual votes can affect political outcomes on a continental level.

“To illustrate that, we have charts showing how many votes it would take to switch an MEP (Member of European Parliament),” says Etienne Bauvir, director of business intelligence and technology at Politico Europe.

“In countries where turnout is notoriously low, like some Eastern European countries, it didn’t take many votes in May to shift an MEP and to have her lose a seat or win a seat. That’s one thing we wanted to make evident to readers – the impact of one vote can be big in some countries,” he says.

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Case in point: Romania, where the Social Democrats earned 22.5% of the vote – causing the party to lose six parliament seats – while Renew Europe collected 22.4% of the vote – causing that party to gain seven seats. European parliamentary elections are held every five years.

Politico Europe’s new hub provides one page for each country, enabling readers to drill further into more precise 2019 election results, such as how pro-European Union candidates fared in France against skeptics of the EU. (Pro-EU MEPs in France currently outnumber EU skeptics 48 to 28.)

Poll of Polls also tracks fresh polling data in each country, offering projections of 2020 votes in individual nations. That helps readers better understand some of the complexities of European politics, including the power of ideological groups.

“In the projections, we can be reactive and proactive in our data analyses,” Bauvir says. “In the European election process, many national parties come together to form groups in the European Parliament. It’s often not clear which party will form which group. We can offer an accurate picture of that reality.”

Think U.S. elections are confusing? Elections to the European Parliament can span thousands of candidates representing hundreds of parties across 28 nations.

With Power BI, visitors to the Politico hub can use interactive features to maneuver polling or election data in ways that help them digest election night results or votes yet to come – both in national parliaments and for the entire European Parliament.

For example, one Politico visualization shows a graph of polling data in the United Kingdom, where citizens will elect their new parliament Dec. 12. By moving a cursor left and right, readers can view how the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties have performed in polling each day from late 2018 to present.

“In the spring, we also had visualizations showing forecasts of how the future European Parliament will look. We could update those visualizations just by changing one data file,” says Hanna Pawelec, a Politico Europe data analyst. “By quickly updating those visualizations, we were one of the first newsrooms to show more in-depth analysis.”

“Power BI is easy enough for a citizen journalist to create a simple interactive with little training, but powerful enough for a seasoned data scientist to do complex analysis across multiple datasets,” says Ben Rudolph, senior director of Microsoft News Labs. “It’s the definition of democratized technology.”

Microsoft News Labs represents the company’s global effort to help journalists and journalism succeed by augmenting human creativity with innovative AI and content-creation technology.

Rudolph’s team began collaborating with Politico Europe after learning that the news organization wanted its audience to understand how the vote in one country could re-shape the entire European political landscape.

The two groups met in Brussels, Belgium (where Politico Europe is based) to discuss solutions that would help readers and viewers better engage with the news organization’s election coverage.

“The challenge wasn’t just wrangling the complexity of 242 parties competing for 705 seats in the European Parliament, but creating an experience that was at once compelling and transparent,” says Vera Chan, Microsoft senior manager for worldwide journalist relations.

Readers flocked to the news site. During the final stages of the European elections in May, Politico Europe’s traffic hit an all-time high with a nearly 30% increase compared to traffic measured one year earlier.

“This election,” Bauvir says, “was the moment to really widen our readership to the average citizen throughout Europe. We’ve now succeeded in retaining much of the additional audience we engaged. That’s another big success due in part to this hub and those visualizations.”

In the months since the election, traffic to Politico Europe remains on average 24% higher compared to the same period in 2018.

Politico Europe is now examining ways to expand the platform, focusing again on Europe, says Natasha Bernard, communications coordinator at Politico Europe.

“Data journalism with Power BI can play a unique role building audience trust,” Rudolph says. “Not only does an interactive visual give readers deep insight into a story, it also gives them unprecedented access to the data behind that insight.

“It’s a completely transparent means of storytelling,” he adds. “We think this will be increasingly important for outlets of all sizes as we approach the 2020 election cycle.”

Images courtesy of Politico Europe.

Earlier this year, we introduced Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) in Power BI as Public Preview. Now, we’re happy to announce that AutoML in Power BI is generally available in all public cloud regions where Power BI Premium and Embedded is available.

Using AutoML in Power BI, business analysts without a strong background in machine learning can build ML models to solve business problems that once required data scientists. Most of the data science behind the creation of the ML models is automated by Power BI, while giving visibility into the process used to create your ML model to provide you with full insight. Since AutoML targets analysts who may not have prior experience building ML models, we have made a significant investment in adding automatic guardrails such as class balancing, training-test data split, cross-validation, missing value imputation, and high cardinality feature detection to ensure that the model produced has good quality.

Macaw, a Dutch full-service digital company, deployed automated machine learning in Power BI to quickly ingest sales data and train, validate, and invoke machine learning models directly in Power BI.  Dave Ruijter, Principal Consultant Data and AI at Macaw, shared that “The automated functionality within Power BI helps us scale how we infuse our solutions with AI capabilities. Now Macaw Power BI analysts can include machine learning in their solutions without involving a data scientist.” One of their customers, Mitch van Deursen, the Co-owner and Chief Information Officer at Shoeby says, “We now get answers to key business questions within five days, where normally modelling would take months. “ Read about their story here.

With the Public Preview release, AutoML in Power BI enabled users to:

• Train a machine learning model to perform Binary Prediction, General Classification, and Regression
• View the model training report
• Apply the ML model to their data, and view predictions and explanations

Since then, we have been improving and adding new capabilities to AutoML in Power BI.

Binary prediction support for non-Boolean outcomes

Earlier, AutoML expected the outcome field for a binary prediction model to be a Boolean value. We now also support non-Boolean values in the outcome field. In the wizard, you can directly choose the target outcome that you’re most interested in, saving you the preprocessing steps of converting it to Boolean.

Improved Feature Recommendation

We improved the statistical methods that suggest input fields that can be used for training the ML model. Auto ML now analyzes a sample of the selected entity, recommends fields, and shows the reasons for fields that are not recommended. If a certain field has too many distinct values or only one value, or low or high correlation with the output field, it would not be recommended.

Controlling training time

AutoML now allows you to control the time for training a model.

You can choose to decrease the training time to see quick results or increase the amount of time spent in training to get the best model. The former is useful when you are building a POC or for making sure that you have selected the right fields.

Improved training reports

Training reports have been improved to make them more readable. Additionally, reports are now generated two times faster.

Binary prediction reports now include a Cost-Benefit analysis tool. Given an estimated unit cost of targeting and a unit benefit from achieving a target outcome, it helps you identify the subset of the population that should be targeted to yield the highest profit.

Explainable AI

AutoML emphasizes the explainability of predictions to provide visibility into fields that are most important. It provides top predictors during training as well as explanations for each prediction that the ML model produces during scoring.

The Top Predictors section has been improved to show comprehensible feature breakdown so that you can easily validate that the model aligns with your business insights about the outcome field. In the house price prediction example below, the feature breakdown chart for “sqft_living”(on the right) shows that higher “sqft_living” values have higher house prices.

In addition to this, we have added support for text features in top predictors.

Explanations for predictions are now surfaced as a separate entity to make them easily accessible and readable. In order to make the model predictions interpretable, we show the contribution of every feature towards the prediction, and these contributions add up to the predicted value.

In the house price prediction example below, you can see that some features have a positive influence (in green), and other features have a negative influence (in red). Adding these contributions to a base value (average value of the house price in the training data in this case), gives you the predicted house price of $379,738, thus allowing you to easily explain these model predictions.

Using this explanations entity you can quickly build reports explaining model predictions. Automatically generated explanation reports will be available shortly.

Get started building you own ML Models

Here is a step-by-step tutorial that shows how to build your machine learning model using Auto ML. To learn more, refer to the documentation. If you have any questions or would like to get in touch with us about your use cases, pain points, please reach out to [email protected]. We’d love to hear about your experiences, feedback, and ideas on how you’d like to use Auto ML in Power BI.

The 2019 Microsoft Business Applications Summit is over, but your learning and discovery is just getting started. Event content is now available on demand in the Dynamics 365 Community, giving you the opportunity to explore 200+ session recordings, download presentations, ask questions, and collaborate with the speakers and experts.

Get started by selecting one of four communities—Dynamics 365, PowerApps, Power BI, and Microsoft Flow—and then browse or search for content that interests you. As a supplement to the event content, be sure to browse the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform product roadmap.

Jumpstart what’s next for your business

Watch the visionary opening keynote for a first look at the new features and capabilities coming next for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. James Phillips, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications Group, and business leaders from across industries give you a preview of what’s next in the 2019 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.

Build your skills at your own pace

Learn directly from the engineers behind Dynamics 365, Power BI, Excel, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, mixed reality, and more. Download presentations to review in-depth and connect with experts in community forums.

Get fresh ideas to solve your toughest challenges

Dig into game-changing technology like AI and mixed reality to amplify the impact of the tools you use every day. Collaborate with the community and share hints and hacks.

Here’s a sample of just some of the sessions available on demand, and be sure to check out the Dynamics 365 Community for the full rundown:

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central roadmap and overview
  Learn how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central helps you connect your business, make smarter decisions, and start and grow easily.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service: What’s new and roadmap
  From recent releases in the Field Service solution to evolution in universal resource scheduling, learn firsthand about new scheduling scenarios, enhanced productivity for onsite workers, better data integration for inventory, and easier connections to Connected Field Service for Azure IoT Central.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations: What’s new in financial management
  Get the tips, tricks, and tools to plan what’s next for your organization, from streamlined periodic processes to improved usability features and more.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing: Connect marketing and sales
  Discover new capabilities and pricing offers that can help you cultivate more sales-ready leads than ever before.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales: Get the most out of the Microsoft ecosystem with new capabilities and integrations
  Pick up best practices to get the most out of Dynamics 365 for Sales, including new forecasting capabilities, integrations with Microsoft Teams and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and in-app solution discovery for configure price quote (CPQ) and data augmentation partners.

Get inspired, boost your skills, and power major digital transformation at your organization. It’s just a click away — watch  the on demand sessions now.

Get ready to flex your business applications skills – and pick up some new ones – at Microsoft Business Applications Summit. Coming to Atlanta, Georgia June 10 – 11, 2019, this is the place to dive deep with the tools you use every day, get a sneak peek at what’s new and next, and connect with our amazing community. Registration is open – secure your spot today!

We’re gearing up for an incredible event this year, with 150+ total-immersion sessions and workshops (plus 16 pre-days!) filled with demos, hints, and hacks that will help you unlock next for your business.

Session catalog preview

The first look at the session catalog is live! This is just the beginning. We’ll be rolling out the full lineup of sessions over the next couple months, but we couldn’t wait to share. Check it out to see what’s in store for this year’s event and start getting excited!

5 more reasons you can’t miss this conference

1. Power better decisions with even better data. Learn how to get the most from your favorite tools: Dynamics 365, Power BI, Excel, Mixed Reality, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow. Build new skills, get tips and tricks, and check out the latest trends and product roadmaps.
2. Plan your perfect learning path. Get hands-on with 16 pre-day workshops and 150+ demo-rich sessions led by industry experts.
3. Ask your toughest questions, and get answers at the source. Go one-on-one with engineers and product experts.
4. Collaborate with our vibrant community. This is the premier conference for power users, analysts, developers, solution architects, and more. Build your network, share ideas and strategies, and pick up best practices.
5. See the future of business applications before anyone else. From keynotes with visionary leaders to a multi-stream viewing lounge, you’ll get an exclusive look at the latest technologies.

Better data, stronger solutions, bigger transformation – don’t miss it! Hope to see you there. Register today!

We’re very grateful to our customers, our community members, and our partners for making Power BI what it is today.

Thank you.

The Power BI Team

Get the 2019 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms report* to learn more.

 

*This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

 

Microsoft has always had to straddle an arguably difficult position in the software trade. The company has always needed to appear technically intricate, granular and powerful in the eyes of hard-core software developers. At the same time, the company has always had to present its software to market with a user-friendly ‘anyone can use it’ out-of-the-box style and approach.

There’s a little of that duality in the firm’s latest power play, which is a combination pack of technologies wrapped up under the Microsoft Power Platform brand.

This is all about presenting a selection of heavyweight backend technologies to hard-core developers and data scientists, but also to would-be so-called citizen developers who are typically businesspeople with an interest in getting applications and data to work the way they want them to work.

CEO Satya: be cool (to others)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has tried to explain to his developer team that it’s not always about being the most amazing software engineer that creates the next big thing. Instead, it’s about creating amazing software power and putting that power in the hands of people who need it.

“You join here [Microsoft, the company itself], not to be cool, but to make others cool,” said Nadella, in a comment that has been widely reported internally and officially referenced here on c|net.

What Nadella meant was: build something so amazing that it empowers other people. This, of course, is a platform play, not a product play i.e. he wants people to use Microsoft technologies to create something great, rather than use an existing Microsoft technology to be great per se. It’s a logical enough strategy i.e. software products come and go, but platforms are more foundational and expansive… and so (typically) form a better long term business bet.

Microsoft Power Platform

The component parts of the Microsoft Power Platform have all previously existed as more distinct entities. This is essentially a coming together of Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow as a more unified offering available on top of Microsoft Azure cloud services.

“Our Power Platform – spanning Power BI, PowerApps and Flow – enables anyone in an organization to start building an intelligent app or workflow where none exists. It is the only solution of its kind in the industry – bringing together no-code/low-code app development, robotic process automation and self-service analytics into a single, comprehensive platform. And it enables extensibility across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 as well as the leading third-party SaaS business applications,” said Microsoft CEO Nadella, in a press statement.

So just looking at the component parts again and explaining their functions, we have Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

Microsoft Power BI is self-service Business Intelligence (BI) app that works to connect and analyze business data and present a graphical visualization of it on screen. It supports 43 languages and the data it ingests can come from an Excel spreadsheet or SharePoint list, an Oracle database or from an SAP or Salesforce application. Nearly 10 petabytes of data are uploaded to the service each month with more than 10 million report and dashboard queries executed against that data every hour.

Microsoft PowerApps forms the company’s citizen application development platform. Theoretically ‘anyone’ (says Microsoft) can use PowerApps to build web and mobile applications without writing code. There’s also a natural connection between Power BI and PowerApps so that users can put insights (from Power BI) in the hands of maintenance workers and others on the frontline in apps built using PowerApps.

Lastly here there is Flow. This is Microsoft’s user interface that allows users to work with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a technology designed to help automate simple tasks (and reduce operational errors) through automated workflows.

Data flows, everywhere

Corporate vice president in Microsoft’s business applications group James Phillips explains that the team’s vision for Microsoft Power Platform started from the recognition that data is increasingly flowing from everything, and a belief that organizations that harness their data – to gain insights then used to drive intelligent business processes – will outperform those that don’t.

“We also recognize there aren’t enough programmers, data scientists and tech professionals to go around. So our goal was to build a platform not targeting these technology experts but for [ordinary] people – and the millions of other frontline workers who see opportunities every day to create something better than the status quo, but who’ve never been empowered to do anything about it,” wrote Philips, in a lengthy Microsoft cloud blog.

Philips and team say that the guiding vision for Microsoft Power Platform was a framework they called the ‘Triple-A Loop’ i.e. a closed-loop system allowing users to gain insights from data (Analyze) used to drive intelligent business processes via apps they build (Act) and processes they automate (Automate).

Why play platform games?

We might stand back and ask why Microsoft is so focused on its new and wider approach to platform games of this kind — and there are three fairly reasonable suggestions we can make here.

First, Microsoft has always done platforms i.e. Windows was and still is a platform and you run other things (apps, databases and other computing services) upon it.

Second, Microsoft has invested heavily in its own Azure cloud platform (which features as a key element of Microsoft Power Platform) and, over and above that, the firm has for a long time now been working to make large portions of its stack (such as Office as a platform, which we detailed here in 2015) big enough to be considered platforms in their own right.

Third, Microsoft (under CEO Nadella at least) appears to understand the power of platforms both inside the Microsoft universe and outside of it. Be that other platform Linux, be it Android or be it a major vendor’s data platform suite from the likes of SAP, Salesforce, Oracle and so on.

This is a world where data comes first — sometimes from databases, sometimes from AI computations, sometimes from the Internet of Things (IoT) and its devices and sometimes from actual users — even before the actual software applications that will feed on that data. That core fact very arguably makes any platform play strategically smarter for long term success… if perhaps not just a little cool too.

 

Happy New Year !

With over 150 features released, 2018 has been a prolific year for Power BI Desktop!

To cap off this successful year, our team put together a fun video, showcasing our pick for the 5 favorite releases of 2018:

1. Report page tooltips [March]
2. Web by example [May]
3. Composite models [July] + aggregations [September]
4. Expand + collapse [November]
5. New filter experience [November]

We’ve also added an Honorable Mention for the Accessibility features released this year, which include the improved formula bar, adding filters from the context menu, and more!

We hope you enjoy the video and would love to hear about your favorite five!

This month we will have a Power BI Report Server update only, but starting February, Power BI Desktop will continue our monthly ship cadence. Looking forward to an even more impactful 2019!

By Ben Rudolph, Managing Director of Modern Journalism, Microsoft Corporate HQ

Today, in collaboration with Microsoft, industry leader POLITICO Europe launched the next wave of its 2019 European Parliamentary election coverage featuring 27 new interactive data visualizations created with Microsoft Power BI. The latest Elections hub content follows last month’s launch of an interactive homepage visualization and includes new country-level pages sharing important information and the latest news about each of the European member states participating in the election.

“Each member state has its own electoral system, its own voter turnout and its own unique political landscape. At POLITICO Europe, we’ve built a European Election hub that reflects this national dimension” said Johannes Boege, Chief Product Officer at POLITICO Europe. “With these country pages, we are again combining our leading journalism with state of the art data technology. Enabled by Microsoft Power BI, our product provides comparisons of 2014 results with the latest projections, linking national parties, their European parliamentary groups, voter turnout and key information on the voting process. At a glance, our readers can get a very detailed and up-to-date overview of the EU elections in their country and compare it with the situation in other member states.”

At Microsoft, we’re thrilled to collaborate with POLITICO Europe to deliver on our commitment to empower the news industry to discover and tell impactful stories in engaging ways.  Recognized as the most influential publication on European affairs for two of the three years since it launched, POLITICO Europe is on a mission to bring nonpartisan education and insight to the European electorate as they navigate the complicated election process, which spans thousands of candidates and hundreds of parties.

To help achieve this goal, the new country pages enable POLITICO Europe readers to interact with reports to see the country-level seats by party as well as voter data from 2014, comparing it to the current predictions for 2019. The reports showcase the breakdown of party seats and affiliated groups, information on the voting system and process and past voter turnout stacked against population. Behind the scenes calculations make it easy for readers to interact with the report to understand the impact their vote could have in the upcoming election. Because the visualizations are built it Power BI, updates can be made in real-time as new data becomes available or news stories emerge.

This new content builds on the success of the homepage visualization that shows the projected composition of the next EU Parliament.

Microsoft is thrilled to continue collaborating with POLITICO Europe to launch new content formats that bring discussion about the future of the EU to new and existing readers.

Find out more about how Power BI is being used to build the solutions on the Power BI blog.

Tags: EU Elections, POLITICO