welcome to Microsoft mechanics coming up
on the show if you're looking for the
latest in data visualization and
business analytics today we're gonna
take a comprehensive look at power bi
will cover bi basics including recent
updates with power bi desktop app and
we'll take a tour of the brand new
capabilities including web-based editing
for your power bi reports new options to
create your own custom visualizations
and capabilities to automatically detect
patterns in your data
[Music]
so welcome back to the show Michael tell
us what's new with power bi well we've
actually last time we did a show we were
just entering into preview and it's been
about ten months since then we've hit
general availability we've added
hundreds of new features to the product
okay so why don't you give us a look at
all the things that you can do alright
so a couple things one this is the same
dashboard that I showed last show but it
just it looks a lot better we've got
more visualizations we've got a new
charting engine what I can do is I can
drill into these live tiles and it takes
me to underlying reports that show me
additional detail that I can then
explore okay I can navigate this this
report I can slice my data I can get
different views of the data I can also
edit this report now the editing is is
new since the last time we actually did
a show you can see here you've got these
two new panels that come out you can see
that you can change all your different
visualizations you see your models here
I'm going to actually create a
visualization so I'm gonna delete this
one and then we're gonna pull some
information over so I'm going to take a
look at this is a model that's on
business travel or it's it's on
traveling expenses across my business
and we're gonna take a look at business
travel costs and then maybe we want to
take a look at that by the actual
country where the planes are people are
departing from and then filter that down
you can see here you can filter it by a
number of different things I'm going to
filter it down for just a European
travel right mm-hmm
so here we'll end up getting a nice
little view of our European travel
across the company across all the
different countries in Europe and you
can see that you can very easily sort of
change the visualization so here you can
see we've changed that to a pie chart
you can change it to a tree map you can
see that the cross filters all work and
that type of thing one of the other
great things that we've introduced is
we've actually open sourced our data
visualization framework so now you can
go to github and you
can download the samples and the framer
can you build your own visualizations in
our community are creating some great
new visualizations and you have some of
these running here one one thing and I
want us to take a step back with is
that's actually in the browser all of
what you're showing here all of the all
of the visualization types that's run in
a browser so don't have any apps to
install in this case you know it's a
great point yeah this is all
browser-based editing so I can actually
really customize these reports and the
dashboards all through the browser
that's terrific so let's see a
customized report or customized
visualizations sure yeah so I've got a
couple here from the community you can
see a list we've got heat maps there's a
breakdown trees bubble charts all kinds
of fancy stuff that they've gone and
created which are really interesting and
I encourage everybody to go take a look
there's a radar chart that I like so I'm
gonna import that radar chart and you
can see it appears as one of the
visualization types and power bi and
then when I click it you can see that
the the radar chart comes up and then it
interacts with the rest of the report as
well so those visualizations act just
like any other visualizations in power
bi now if I go back I want to show you
something else as well so one of the
great things that we've built into the
dashboards or natural language query and
the way that this works is I can type
any questions I have in my data so say
show me the total number of trips for
internal versus external travel versus
maybe tradeshow travel versus recruiting
purposes as examples and every time I
type what's happening is that the system
is understanding the semantics of what
I'm typing and then bringing back the
data from the underlying data source and
showing it in the visualization and the
great thing is I actually have to be a
DBA and have to know sequel queries or
Doc's query and language to be able to
get these visualizations right no that's
right so it essentially allows a a more
sort of casual user of data to be able
to actually get
some really interesting insights out of
their out of their data and then once
I've got this sort of little
visualization that I want to track I can
also sort of customize this if I like
change the colors and all that great
stuff and then once it's just right I
can pin it back to my dashboard and I
can continue to monitor that track that
data alongside all of the other
different visualizations that are in my
report so you can see you can move it
around and customize it just the way you
want it so great stuff and I know we've
done a lot of work in terms of being
able to collaborate better inside of
power bi - right that's right that's
another one of our great new features to
support for office 365 groups so I can
go in here and I can actually create a
group in power bi and what that allows
me to do is define who's in my team work
team whatever happens to be and it's
just the members of that team that will
have access to the dashboards and the
reports all right they'll have added
rights they can change them they can
collaborate around the data the other
great thing is that because we're
leveraging the office 365 groups feature
it allows me to navigate to all the
other workloads in office 365 all right
like the calendar your files all these
things that you're gonna need in terms
of getting group team work done are
right there from power bi that's right
so what else do you have to show us cuz
I know you've done some work in terms of
a new locally installed app to help
build some of these reports that's right
we now have a new free power bi desktop
tool and the desktop tool is a tool that
we've created to allow business analysts
to work with their data
now hold on how does this differ from
Excel well it's actually very similar to
excel so the work that we've done around
being able to connect to your data being
able to transform that data model that
data that work that experience is
consistent between Excel and the power
bi tool so essentially what I do as a
business analyst is learn how to do this
one time and then I can choose which
tool I want to use Excel allows you to
build those analytical spreadsheets and
this is a tool for really building those
interactive reports a free-form canvas
with drag-and-drop and data exploration
let's see what this can do well here you
can see inside the tool if you take a
look at all the data that we can connect
through - we've got a broad range of
different data sources so we've got flat
files we've got databases we've got
services that live up on Azure so if I
think about streaming data into the
product or data that might sit in big
data source like HD inside we can
connect through to that and connect
through to Hadoop to spark to data that
might be in a number of different SAS
applications all of these content
connectors are all available to me so
that I can connect to that data as a
starting place right and once I've
connected to that data I can come in I
can model it up here we see a bunch of
different connections between various
different tables I can add calculations
on top of that data so I can create my
custom calcs and all that good stuff and
then is when you know once I've done all
that data prep I can build out my
interactive reports and it's a it's a
drag-and-drop canvas where I can create
these different visualizations same type
of look and feel as we saw in the web so
it's more consistent to that and then
these are very interactive so you can
see that all the different
visualizations are interconnected and
we'll cross filter and once that's just
the way I want it I can actually publish
that right into the power bi service and
then if we go to the service we can see
that we see that same report here in the
browser with all the interactivity that
I just showed you and then if I want as
we saw before I can continue to edit
this in the browser those same that same
experience shows up and all the sharing
is very consistent with what you do in
SharePoint to be able to let other
people in your group or in their team
see it that's right yes so it's a great
way to share of reports across the team
I know you've got more to show us so why
don't you tell us about some of the new
stuff in addition to what you've already
shown us yeah a couple other things so
last time we were here we talked about
one of the ways to get data into the
power bi service is also through these
prepackaged content packs that we've
created right so the content packs are
great we've got a log you extended the
list I think last time we were on the
show we had five or six now we're up to
29 we released one of these every single
week and a Content pack is a prepackaged
set of dashboards and reports for a
particular SAS based service so all I
have to do is log into that service and
me my dashboards and reports get
pre-populated with data but even beyond
this now we can actually create these
for our own company our own organization
right that's right so inside your
organization you can create
organizationally specific content packs
ok this means that somebody's gone and
packaged up a set of models and reports
and dashboards all together and then I
as an end user all I have to do is come
into this library I can see all the
different content packs across Microsoft
that people have have published out and
then click on that content pack and then
connect that was really catching my eye
earlier the 520 bridge super important
for people that work in Redmond that's
right so yeah the 520 bridge is the
bridge that all the satellites cross
over to get to work every morning it's
always congested but this is a little
dashboard that's being created inside
Microsoft that she shows you the volume
during the of traffic during the time of
day so you can updated there it's live
it's actually streaming data from the
sensors on the bridge and the cameras
from the toll bridge so you see a lot of
different informations captured you
actually see the colors of the cars and
how many different cars are a particular
color you can see white is a very
popular color for cars here in Seattle
apparently I can see the number of cars
that traveled over the bridge today
48,000 and always feels like it spent
more than that it always feels like a
lot more so that's absolutely true and
there's one other thing I want to show
you okay so along the theme of making it
easier to do more with your data right
so it's easier to for us to connect to
data with those content packs it's
easier for us to interact with the data
through the natural language query
we've also automated serve the product
to be able to discover trends and
seasonality in your data and present
that out to you so you can now actually
get insights automatically presented for
a dataset we've got a data set here it's
Hawaii data Hawaii travel data so
essentially when you're flying into
Hawaii you fill out that little card of
the intent of your trip and while you're
there and all that good stuff so we've
got that data
we can go and we can view insights that
the product has automatically generated
on that data so a couple things where do
you think people actually fly to Hawaii
from the most probably a lot from the
United States that's right so the West
Coast is where they go the most to
Hawaii and of course every time there I
see a lot of Japanese tourists Japanese
is third on the list okay beat bait out
my home country Canada by by a small
margin and then the other interesting
insights it's discovered particularly
around the Japanese tourists one is that
the actual purpose isn't spend per trip
is coming down per per Japanese tourist
which is interesting but the number of
days that they spend is actually longer
so a number of days in their trip is
longer so they're staying more days
that's a lot of new great capabilities
when I get start with power bi yeah if
you go to power bi com you can get
started for free so you just enter your
work address and we'll provision a free
version of power bi for you and in terms
of how to get power bi what I need to do
there to get power bi we now have power
bi available standalone and is part of
the office 365 ee 5 offering which is
now available and of course you can
learn more we've done a lot of great
content on power beyond Microsoft and
office mechanics if you go back to the
shows you can check out Lotus f1 teens
implementation of power bi as well as
how we predicted El Clasico z' match
when we were in Barcelona but we've also
had a few shows with you Michael yeah
well that's nice thanks that's about all
the time we have for today's show of
course you can stay up to date with the
latest on Microsoft Mechanics Wednesdays
or as news breaks thank you all for
watching and good bye for now
[Music]
you