Power BI versus Tableau but can you instead make power bi and tableau work
together I'm going to show you the exact steps you need but also answer why it
actually makes a lot of sense for teams and organizations to have power bi in
tableau play-along you know whether you agree or disagree with my opinion I
would love to hear your thoughts on this topic so just leave me a comment down
below and if you're interested in self-service bi or bi or tableau make
sure to subscribe and click the bell icon so you're notified whenever I go
live to answer your bi questions I'm going to show you how to connect to a
blow to a power bi model and Excel power pivot model and to analysis services now
these are all flavors of the same thing but I'll show you the steps for each if
instead you're looking for a head-to-head comparison of power bi
versus tableau across five key factors click here to watch that video or down
on the details first let's talk about why you would even care to connect
tableau and power bi together now people often think about power bi versus
tableau has an either/or choice now I don't believe that's true imagine an
organization using office 365 as a power bi Excel a Microsoft shop if you will
but could there be a need for some power users within that organization to use
tableau why not tableau is an industry-leading tool with really unique
sets of capabilities built specifically around that power user that heavy-duty
analyst if the company would benefit from those insights then why not enable
that scenario so in this scenario our model is a power bi model a big
breakthrough with power bi is the ability to establish the single source
of truth by creating the model and I talked more about this in my power bi
step-by-step tutorial you can click here to access that or from the link down
below so instead of creating hundreds or thousands of somewhat disconnected
reports you create one model and all of your reports are powered by that one
model that's single source of truth and from that single source you can
knack of visualization tool of your choice it could be power of the eye
reports and dashboards or you could use Excel to create your reports or even use
tableau I call it B yov or bring your own visualization now let's see how we
can hook up tableau with power bi so here we are in tableau and let's see how
we can use tableau to connect to power bi model in a power bi desktop file
maybe in a power bi dot-com publish model or what about an analysis services
SSIS tabular or an Excel power pivot models so let's looking at these let's
go back to tableau and we're gonna click on this service section I want to click
more and right there well okay somehow move down at the bottom but there's
analysis services and Microsoft power pivot I'm gonna start with the first one
and let's see how that works so I'm gonna say analysis services and in here
you can point to an azure analysis server or you know a server path to
provide the server address that you have right now I'm just running the SSA
established server on this current machine so I'm just gonna say localhost
and that's good enough I'm gonna use Windows authentication and just sign in
and now it's going to show me the database and and I think of these as
models as different models so right now I have well 20 or worse in hello world
picnic and if I click on adventureworks typically for models deploying on
Assisi's tablet you only see one cube inside there so model I just select that
and that's it I'm ready to go you can see kind of the fields here but you as
soon as you go to worksheet now you have all your measures down here now this in
case are all the DAX measures that have been defined in the model so all of that
heavy lifting has already been done in the model it's it's all ready to go and
now you're ready to use so let's we can go sales by my territories and of course
you can you know you can kind of build it as using the full functionality of
tableau that's probably not a great example given an adventuress data but
again all of that functionality is just here for you all of the tables are
available and you can slice and dice it and and
as you need using the full capabilities of tableau connected to our tabular
server now let's do the next step and connect to an Excel power pivot model so
I'm going to go back and let's go back to tableau and I'm gonna go click more
again well power people to see right there but you can select it from this
list Bower pivot and in this case now notice that you can also point to a
SharePoint URL if bar pivot files are being hosted on a SharePoint but I'm
just gonna point to my local file see how this works
oh there we go and in wrench your works power pivot sign in great so now it's
connected to that and in here we can connect to the model and as before we
have all of the measures listed out and now I can just go to my sheet let's do a
new one and and notice the so now I'm connected to this one which is to the
power pivot file and it has its own set of measures and dimensions or tables as
they existed in that power pivot model so again all of that work that has been
already done in the model now it's at your disposal to visualize it however
you want in tableau all of the measures all of the DAX measures in there all of
the dimensions tables are all in there ok let's go connect to this power bi
model now this one requires a step so what we're gonna do first is I'm gonna
launch to open this in in power bi desktop alright so the file is open now
know guys I've said this before that all of these technologies SSE establish a
power pivot bar bi comm power bi desktop essentially it's the same technology or
pretty similar so in fact the power bi desktop is in a way running a tabular
server and an analysis server on your machine you we just have to find the
port that we need to connect to so it this is not that different from again
the server running and hosting this model and so this technique is used
quite commonly to also connect Excel to a running power bi desktop model
and the quickest way or one of the ways at least is you use the tool called Dax
to do there are other ways to do - I'm just going to show you this one and you
say connect and this one lets you pick the bar be a model that's running I'm
going to connect to the adventureworks model that I just opened hit connect and
all I'm looking for here is really the disinformation that which port is it
running on so it's running on five seven five five zero now I have that
information I can just go back and say connect to analysis services and point
to that port number so I have the port number five seven five five zero I'm
gonna click sign in and click on model and voila I'm connected that let's
create a new sheet and this time this one is connected to a power bi desktop
model but again we have all the richness from that model all the measures you can
see there is a you know quarter date year-to-date prior year you don't have
to redefine any of that that heavy lifting is already being done in the
model and you can simply reuse that and use tableau as a visualization engine
let's talk about the big one the power bi comm data sets how do we connect
tableau to these right that's that's the big question well unfortunately you
can't and it's not that you cannot connect any tool to these models in fact
both Excel and power bi have this capability in Excel using the power bi
add-in here you can say connected data and this connects right to your power bi
data sets and you can choose choose in there and this will give you essentially
a pivot table connected to that model in the cloud powerbi.com publish model and
similarly power bi desktop you can also say get data connect to power bi data
set and in here again it's connected to the cloud power bi service I can go to
my workspace connector adventureworks click load which doesn't actually load
it's simply connecting to the data in the cloud and I have I can build a
report which is connected to that single source of truth so so other tools can
connect to power bi com-pub leash model but not tableau
at least not right now but I have submitted requests to both Barbie ayan
Tablo to make this possible find the link in the details below and please
please vote for them and drop me a comment and let me know because it would
be a win-win-win it would be a win for customers or consumers who are using
these tools because the reality is that modern organizations have a mix of tools
have a mix of software and service providers and it really benefits us when
they work together but it's also a win for Microsoft and a win for tableau or
other third-party visualization tools and here's why in today's age
collaboration comes before competition and nothing exemplifies that better than
Microsoft under the helm of Satya Nadella
so we're friend let's let's make this possible go ahead and vote using the
links below and just drop me a comment after you've done so if you do have
other thoughts around this topic I would love to hear from you now if you want to
hear more from me and catch me live when I go live on YouTube make sure to
subscribe and click the bell until next time power on my friend