Power BI – Page 2 – Sick Gaming

As organizations embrace a data culture to drive business decisions, they need an enterprise business intelligence platform that can meet their sophisticated needs – from self-service BI to full enterprise governance, from paginated reports to full interactive data exploration, and from small data sets to petabytes of data.

In July, we laid out the roadmap for Power BI to help organizations unify modern and traditional BI on one enterprise platform, and empower business analysts by expanding self-service data prep for big data. Since then, we’ve shipped a number of capabilities that deliver on this roadmap: Premium multi-geo allows customers to address data residency requirements, aggregations enable data analysis over petabyte sized datasets with trillions of rows of data, and the new Power BI Home landing page and dashboard commenting make it easier to get to your most important content and collaborate across the enterprise.

Today, we’re announcing the availability of several new capabilities that we laid out in our July roadmap.

Dataflows expand self-service data prep in Power BI

Power BI already includes robust self-service data preparation capabilities in Power BI Desktop through the familiar Power Query based experiences that are used by millions of users worldwide. We are excited to announce the public preview of dataflows in Power BI, taking self-service data preparation to the next level.

Dataflows enable business analysts to create data preparation logic that can be reused across multiple Power BI reports and dashboards.
Dataflows can be linked together to create sophisticated data transformation pipelines that enable business analysts to build on each other’s work. A new recalculation engine automatically tracks dependencies and recomputes data as new data is ingested.
Dataflows can be configured to store the data in the customer’s Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 instance, fueling collaboration across roles. Business analysts can seamlessly operate on data stored in Azure Data Lake Storage, taking advantage of its scale, performance, and security. Meanwhile, data engineers and data scientists can extend insights with advanced analytics and AI from complementary Azure Data Services like Azure Machine Learning, Azure Databricks, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
Dataflows support the Microsoft Common Data Model, giving organizations the ability to leverage a standardized and extensible collection of data schemas (entities, attributes and relationships)

Columbia Sportswear uses Power BI to empower a broad group of employees to self-discover, share and monitor insights across a diverse range of data sources in the cloud and on-premises. Dataflows unlocks new possibilities for their analysts leveraging large datasets.

“Dataflows are one of the more exciting additions to Power BI,” said Chris Weis, Senior Analytics Product Manager at Columbia Sportswear. “It amplifies Power BI’s ability to handle large datasets. Our analysts can now scale large data transformations beyond the resources of their PC, and accelerate PowerQuery performance in a big way.”

For more background on dataflows, check out Adi Regev’s blog.

SQL Server Reporting Services technology now in Power BI

A modern, compliant and unified enterprise BI platform for business analytics is easier than ever with our latest enterprise operational reporting capabilities.

Our popular SQL Server Reporting Services technology is now part of Power BI and available in public preview, providing a unified, secure, enterprise-wide reporting platform accessible to any user across devices. Pixel-perfect paginated reports can now be included alongside Power BI’s existing interactive reports.

“The availability of paginated reports in the Power BI service removes the last technical barrier to running all types of reports in the cloud,” said John White, Power BI MVP and Chief Technology Officer of Tygraph. “The choice of on premises or in the cloud no longer needs to be a feature decision. Customers with a significant investment in reporting services can now move to Power BI knowing that their reports can move right along with them.”

For more background on Paginated reports in Power BI, check out Chris Finlan’s blog.

Power BI Desktop November Update

We continue to innovate at a rapid pace with weekly updates for the Power BI service and monthly updates for Power BI Desktop. The November update for Power BI Desktop, shipping next week, includes several features the Power BI community has asked for:

Follow-up questions for Q&A explorer. You can now ask follow-up questions inside the Q&A explorer pop-up, which means the question will take into account the previous questions you asked as context. For example, you can ask “List customers in London” and then ask the follow up question “What did they buy” and the result for that second question will only be for London customers.

New modeling view makes it easier to work with large models. You can now have multiple diagram layouts, customize and save them, leverage display folders, and several additional enhancements that improve performance and experience – available in preview.
Expand and collapse matrix row headers. Row headers on the matrix visual now work like Excel PivotTables, with the ability to expand and collapse individual row headers.
Copy and paste between PBIX files. You can copy and paste visuals between PBIX files, greatly improving usability and speeding up the process of creating new reports.

Learn more about the public preview of dataflows and SQL Server Reporting Services technology in Power BI during the PASS Summit at the day 1 keynote. For a deeper dive, please join our session Power BI: the Future for Modern and Enterprise BI on November 8^th. Attendees will see the new capabilities in action and hear more about what’s coming.

We have other fantastic content at PASS that you also won’t want to miss, including sessions covering our latest announcements with Introducing Advanced Data Preparation using Power BI Dataflows and Modern Enterprise Reporting with Power BI Report Server and the Power BI Service.

written by

Mark Mobley

A ’near-futurist‘ scours data for hidden clues about how the world works

How does self-described “Trend Curator” Rohit Bhargava navigate the future? By shredding magazines and planting sticky notes. Throughout each travel-packed year of international speaking and teaching, he collects untold piles of periodicals, then skims, tears and screens their editorial and advertising content for clues to what’s now, what’s new and — most of all — what’s going to be influential in the years to come.

“The trends,” Bhargava said, “really explain how the world works.”

Using what he calls his “haystack method,” Bhargava sorts and sifts and shifts the material he and his team have found. Gradually, connections are made, combinations arise, synchronicities emerge and trends appear. He compiles what he gleans in an annual series of books called “Non Obvious: How To Predict Trends And Win The Future,” which have been published in more than a dozen languages. These have schooled more than a million businesspeople and interested civilians about the cultural currents, jet streams and eddies that shape our lives.

“You’ve got to look somewhere other than where everyone else is looking,” said Bhargava at his airy home, where visitors are welcomed by photo collages of his two young sons, in a leafy suburb of Washington, D.C. “I tend to pick up a lot of stuff about things I otherwise would never have picked up because the media here are so U.S.-centric.”

His omnivorous media diet includes everything from legacy magazines like The Atlantic and Variety to city magazines (Washingtonian), alumni magazines (Emory magazine), specialty publications (USA Philatelic, Adweek), foreign in-flight magazines and periodicals definitely not published with him in mind (Teen Vogue, Modern Farmer).

The irony of a “near-futurist” relying so heavily on paper in the digital age is not lost on him.

The irony of a ‘near-futurist’ relying so heavily on paper in the digital age is not lost on him.

“I think that people are more surprised about that than I am,” Bhargava said. “What you see is the paper. What you don’t see is my Feedly account, where I read hundreds of stories each week.” He also relies on conversations at conferences and interviews by his associates. But Bhargava sees a certain tactical advantage in scanning a vast amount of information in physical form.

“There’s a reason every James Bond villain looks down on that diorama of the world they’re trying to conquer,” he says. “Hopefully I’m not doing that for evil.”

He smiled and added, “Maybe there is some evil, because I want people to think for themselves and a lot of people don’t want that.”

Bhargava was born in India and came to the United States at 6 months old. After studies at Emory University he moved to Australia in 1998 and began his career at a company called Dimension Data, where he worked for three years before joining the Sydney office of advertising agency Leo Burnett. He returned to the U.S. in 2003 and started working the following year in Washington at Ogilvy. He stayed at that advertising agency until 2012, when he left to start his own consultancy.

Conference and convention planners appreciate the experiences Bhargava himself provides — he speaks at upward of 50 events a year, in addition to consulting with individual companies and teaching smaller groups. “My goal is to give them something they can do, not just inspire them,” he said. He wants to help his audiences find interesting ideas in unexpected places.

While he may appreciate tradition and rigorous methodology, he is anything but a stickler for doing things the way they’ve always been done.

“Our habits are really hard to unlearn,” he told an audience at a recent construction software convention in San Antonio. “The things that we know, the best practices, are really hard to abandon.

If we are going to be innovators, we are going to have to leave some things behind.

“If we are going to be innovators, we are going to have to leave some things behind.”

That’s why one of his five rules for Non-Obvious thinking is to “be fickle” — in other words, keep it moving. The others are “be observant,” “be curious,” “be thoughtful” and “be elegant.” That final command is the guide for the pithy names he likes to assign to the trends he observes.

For example, ”brand stand” is his term for how corporations can make themselves more attractive by backing up their work with socially conscious messaging and actions. (“The job of marketing is not to sell a car, it’s to get people to come into the dealership,” Bhargava explained.) “Predictive protection” is what he calls device makers working to anticipate and defend user vulnerabilities. And “approachable luxury” is the idea that experiences and objects that evoke authenticity and sincerity are now sometimes considered as valuable as high-end products from legacy makers.

In addition to isolating 15 trends for each edition of the Non Obvious books, he also looks back at previous years to reassess the accuracy of his own predictions. Take two from 2013: ”precious print” and “branded inspiration.” While consumers’ fondness for books and print media in general hasn’t waned (Bhargava still gives that trend an A five years later), brands are less willing to stage dramatic one-off events to stand out (today he gives that one a C).

While reevaluating trends, Bhargava realized he could also present them in new ways. He is increasingly using data visualization as a storytelling tool. The Microsoft Power BI platform allowed him to create The Non-Obvious Trend Experience, a periodic table of elements-style dashboard that shows how trends connect across years, industries and areas of interest.

The playful, informative Power BI dashboard is yet another product of an ever-expanding Non-Obvious universe. He’s planning what he calls “the most Non-Obvious thing to do,” a short-form podcast about the past hosted by a futurist. And he and his wife, Chhavi, are co-owners of the publishing imprint Ideapress, which has published 22 books and has another 12 coming soon. His own contribution to the series will be a volume on running a small business.

“I think any of us can be more innovative, more creative,” he told his San Antonio audience. “We just have to give ourselves permission to do it.” He demonstrated that the following morning by leading a workshop of about two dozen executives and staffers. They gathered around tables piled high with magazines.

He opened with a drawing exercise and soon the group was on to Bhargava’s haystack method, scouring the magazines before them for new ideas and things they hadn’t seen before. “I know it’s uncomfortable for some of you, but these magazines are for ripping,” he said. “I want to hear you ripping things out of these magazines. It might be an ad, it might be a story. Feel free to collaborate with your table.”

Curation is the ultimate method for transforming noise into meaning.

Two tables pulled the same story about new leashes for walking with children. Another person landed on a makeup line from Crayola. Yet another found an under-the-desk bicycle apparatus that generates power through pedaling. “That’s like next-level LEED certification,” Bhargava joked. “You can power your own building.”

In under an hour, the participants caught a glimpse of what is for Bhargava a year-round process producing mounds of material that gain more meaning with age and comparison.

“Sometimes we have to give ourselves a little bit of time,” he said. He thinks of his haystack method as akin to collecting frequent flyer miles. The ideas are there, mounting over time, ready be cashed in when they’re needed.

Frank Di Lorenzo Jr., a participant from Sacramento, California, called the session “excellent.”

“It got me to think a little more creatively,” Di Lorenzo said. “It’s like taking a step. If I always start on my right foot, this was my left. For an hour, he accomplished a lot.”

“I never saw anybody present this kind of topic before,” added Mary Cunningham of Jupiter, Florida. “It helps you think beyond the obvious. Don’t take things at face value. It allows you to open your mind to other ideas. The way he presents the material, it’s very easy to comprehend and allows the ideas to sink in easily.”

“Curation,” as Bhargava writes in “Non Obvious” and shared in his seminar, “is the ultimate method for transforming noise into meaning.”

Even if the noise is as much the shredding of magazines and riffling of sticky notes as it is the rising, roaring tide of cultural chatter.

Tag: Power BI

Power BI Desktop adds dataflows, enterprise reporting and more

‘Near-futurist’ Rohit Bhargava scours data for hidden clues about how the world works

Mark Mobley