- Coming up, we take a look at updates to Power BI
including new capabilities to help you bookmark
and spotlight your data during presentations,
enhanced AI for quick insights and Q and A,
options for bi-directional integration
between Power BI and other apps,
new metrics to see how your reports are being consumed,
and how you can securely share your reports externally.
We're also gonna show you how you can achieve
increased scale and performance with Power BI Premium.
(techno music)
So I'm joined today by Will Thompson,
a familiar face from the Power BI engineering team.
Welcome.
- Thanks very much.
Pleasure to be on the show.
- So it's been a while since we featured Power BI
and Microsoft Mechanics, but if people haven't looked
at Power BI in a while, what's new?
- So you should know, we've been constantly evolving
Power BI desktop to make more rich analytic
and reporting applications.
We've also been bringing more AI type of capabilities
with two particular features, quick insights, Q and A.
We've been making investments in other ways
to integrate Power BI into other application experiences
and also providing some more scale and performance options
through some Power BI Premium.
- Okay, so let's dive into it and see what you can do
with Power BI in action.
- Yeah, sure.
So the first thing I'm gonna show is a couple
of improvements that we've been making
around navigating through your data
through a feature called Bookmarks
and one called Drillthrough.
- [Jeremy] Okay.
- So I'm here in Power BI desktop
which is where people spend most of their time
when they're building reports.
And I've got some data here about the top 100 movies
every year since 1985.
There's a whole host of data here.
And drawing interesting insights out
to help tell a story can be quite difficult,
and that's where the Bookmarks come in.
I've got a few set up here on the right hand side already
and actually just creating one is really simple.
I'll just set the reports up exactly how I want
to show one of these insights and choose Add.
Then I can rename it.
We're looking here at Warner Brothers
so let's just call it WB.
And then re-order it to put it into the order
of the story I want to tell.
That's going to really help you, if you imagine
like I'm a part of a streaming company
or I work for a movie studio, I want to tell this
really kind of concise and impactful story
around the data, Bookmarks will help me do that.
So when I'm presenting this story back to my executives,
I can just click through these to go scene by scene
through my story.
So here I'm looking at, you know, Warner Brothers,
one of the most successful franchises is Harry Potter,
but I can also do things like spotlighting
on a particular visual to really draw
people's attention to that.
You'll see it dims everything else out
around it in the report and really focuses on that chart.
- [Jeremy] How do you do that spotlight?
- [Will] Well, creating it is really simple.
Just select the visual you want,
and on this dot dot dot menu,
you'll see there is a Spotlight option
and that enables or disables this kind of dimming.
You don't have to do any of the formatting,
it's just part of that bookmark.
- So you can just walk through these bookmarks,
and I'm thinking back to all those times
I typically create a PowerPoint deck
and tell the story that I want,
in this case, there's no extra work
and the data's all something that you can interact with,
which is super cool.
So what about offline use?
Can I do things like add notes or audio or other things
to be able to really make different reports pop?
- You know, you can add commentary
in the form of things like text boxes or even shapes.
So, for example, I've got this detail report here,
I can put boxes around things to highlight particular bits
of information and text boxes here as well.
So if somebody else is reviewing these bookmarks
without me present, they can still get more
of that information as well.
And (mumbles) is a really interesting idea,
we're really thinking about adding it in the future.
One of the other great things about these bookmarks is
that if somebody wants to go off-piece,
kind of do some more analysis and click around,
they can do that as part of this story.
So I can use another feature here called Drillthrough.
For example, I might jump to one of these specific movies.
When I right click on it, you'll see this option
for Drillthrough to the movie details.
- [Jeremy] Okay.
- [Will] And that will take me to another page in the report
filtered down to just the movie I was looking at.
- [Jeremy] So what do you have to do
to set up that drillthrough?
- That was really simple, right.
So over on the right hand side here,
you'll see there's an area here called Drillthrough Filters.
And all I need to do is find the filter I'm interested in,
so in this case, I'm looking at a movie.
It might be that I'm looking at a customer
or a particular product or service line,
but whatever it is that is relevant in your organization.
I drag that over into this drillthrough filters area
and now any chart that I have that uses that field,
I can drillthrough well.
- Oh, okay, that makes it very easy
and very easy to interact with like we see here.
- Yeah, exactly.
- So it's really great then for navigating
all the different BI reports that we have.
Now you mentioned intelligence,
what are you doing in terms of infusing intelligence
into Power BI?
- Yeah, sure.
So, AI is a really big investment area for us.
One of those areas that we're doing
is bringing some capabilities that we had
up in the Power BI server, which helped end-users find
insights in the data behind the dashboards.
And we found that it's actually also really beneficial
to augment the human process of data analysis.
- Right.
- So not just something as an end-user
when I've got a pre-formatted dashboard,
but here when I'm trying to find those insights.
For example, I'm looking at gross takings here again
and I can see there was this big jump from 2014 to 2015.
Now with the new capability called Quick Insights,
rather than having to go and try and build the charts
I need to find out what that was,
I can just ask Power BI.
Say analyze this and explain the increase for me.
- [Jeremy] Okay.
- [Will] What this is gonna do is go
and run a sat machine learning algorithms
to go and try to find what the biggest things
that impacted that change over those two years.
- [Jeremy] Right.
- [Will] we can see there are some particular movies
that made a big impact there.
But actually at the studio level,
you'll see Universal and Buena Vista were really
big contributors to that change.
And I can use these to help me build out the visuals
in my report.
All I need to do, I can choose
different visualization types here.
- [Jeremy] That looks really good because you can see
kind of what was contributing to the gain and the losses.
- [Will] Yeah, exactly.
And that's a really nice way of visualizing that data.
Now I could have gone and got this manually
but it would have taken a lot of steps.
Power BI has done it for me.
- [Jeremy] Right.
- [Will] So when I have it here, I can see, you know,
Universal and Buena Vista were way higher
than the other studios.
And for Buena Vista, in particular,
it's because of Star Wars.
That was a massive movie that year.
- So what this is doing, it's really looking
for anomalies in the data, but kind of as you scroll
this list, you might find some different things
that are kind of useful and some things
that aren't as useful.
You can actually vote up and down
those types of insights, right?
- [Will] Yeah, exactly.
So when I'm looking at that list,
I've got these thumbs up and thumbs down buttons as well,
so you can help give us feedback
to help train the model as to why that wasn't
or was important.
- So in this case, Power BI really helped you
in terms of building out that visual for you
and really stop you from having to build
that all out yourself.
You know you probably could have,
what else can we do at the same time with Power BI?
- Yeah, let's swap into another data set
and I'll show you something else that we brought
from those end-user dashboards,
and that's natural language analysis.
- [Jeremy] Okay.
A feature called Q and A that we brought here
onto the desktop again to help people build
those visuals quickly.
- We've been using Q and A on the browser for a while.
- Right, exactly.
So I've got some data here about traffic accidents.
So it's really simple though, using this Q and A feature,
to just start asking questions.
So I can say, you know, "What was the average age
"of drivers?"
And immediately, it's going to give me a response back.
Really simple, I just ask a question
and it's gonna give me a visual back here.
- And the great thing is if you're a bad typist
with lots of typos like me, it even accommodates for that.
- Yeah, and I can say things like,
"How many accidents per state,"
and it will understand that, as you're asking
for information about states, you probably ought
to see it on a map.
It will give you the right sort of visualization
based on some rules we have
about data visualization best practice.
- Very cool and you can even filter more and more
into that data, is that right?
- Exactly, it's just like any other visual in my report.
But I can ask actually some really complex questions
here as well.
So I can say something like, "What was the average age
"of male passengers?"
And you know I can keep specifying more filters on this
that people who used a seatbelt,
and even then, like in King County,
where we are here in Seattle,
whether the weather was clear.
- Okay.
- And Power BI's gonna enter it over that
and find all the relevant bits of information
and pull it out, just giving you a result back
really, really simple.
- Right, in this case also, not all the fields were
actually named the way that you actually had them
in the tabular data.
This really helped in terms of, kind of,
translating all that into human speech.
- It does.
And you can train this model as well
and add kind of more linguistic capabilities to it.
So, for example, that word seatbelt,
seatbelt doesn't actually exist in the model.
They talk about restraint or a helmet.
- [Jeremy] Right.
- Those are the things that's kind of the technology
in the data.
But we've been able to teach and train that model
to help understand some more words.
- There's lots of really great time savers.
So let's switch gears for a second though
and talk about how we can extend the benefits of Power BI
into other Office experiences.
So we've seen integration in the past
with things like Teams or SharePoint,
but what are some new things that we can do with Power BI?
- Yeah, you know, it's not just Office.
We can actually take Power BI concept
into any application, so any third party application,
a developer can use our API to pull Power BI content
into their app.
- Okay.
- But it works the other way as well.
We can bring really rich content from other places,
for example, Visio right here into Power BI desktop reports.
So there's a custom visualization that the Visio team made.
When you connect to the Office 365 store here
from within Power BI desktop,
I can search through all the different visualizations
that were available for Power BI.
Visio's just one of those.
Once you've actually embedded that into your report,
you can hook it up to any Visio diagram,
and here's an example where we've done that.
So I've got like a retail floor plan here.
We've attached it to some Power BI report and charts.
What I want to, you know, if I just choose
one of these data points, I'll see that the Visio diagram
gets filtered down and focuses on just the carousel
or the rack with the clothing on it
for that type of clothing.
Conversely, I can click on something in the diagram,
for example, I'll choose this red one
because there's something going wrong there.
I can see it being highlighted in the charts
on the right hand side too.
- So this looks really powerful in terms
of, kind of, making a spatial context
for the data that you're seeing
so that you can really narrow down,
in this case, the racks where, you know,
maybe sales are better versus other racks
in that retail environment.
Now if you want to see how all this is set up,
we have a show on the latest Visio updates
where you can learn more in terms of
how to get all this running for yourself.
So we just saw a lot of great ways
to derive insights and really create a story
that's been enriched with custom visuals.
How do I go about getting this all distributed then
within my organization?
- Right, right.
So for a while we've had some really simple ways
of sharing dashboards and reports,
but we're making some enhancements
to build ways of sharing sets of purpose build reports
and dashboards to your users
through something called Power BI apps.
So, like I said, you've been able to do something simple
here for a little while, which is,
and I have a particular dashboard,
I just hit the share button,
I can start typing email addresses
to send an invite to an individual bit of content.
But if I've got a number of dashboards here
or reports, as well, and I want to package those all up,
I can create this Power BI app.
So from here in this workspace,
I'm gonna choose the different bits
I want to include in my application.
And then choose to publish that app.
I'm gonna do things like give it a description,
I can review the bits of content again being included,
and choose which is the landing page for it,
and then I get to choose who's going to have access
to this application.
Is it something that I'm going to put out
to everybody in my organization?
Are there specific individuals and groups?
And this is all just backed by Office 365
Azure Active Directory to determine
who's gonna be able to get access to those.
And then when it comes to consuming this,
I just come to this apps page
and this gives me a really clean, clear view
of all of the dashboards and reports I need to do my job.
- Right, so this is really great in terms
of making it easy for internal sharing,
and, of course, you can share one by one as well.
- Yeah, that's right.
And for external sharing, we've also integrated
with Azure Active Directory B to B.
That's now available through Power BI too.
- Right and this is a technology we've covered
in the past on the show.
Let me demonstrate how to make all of this work
because it's actually pretty simple to set up.
In fact, it's set up by default with Azure AD
when you're using Power BI.
So here I am in side of Azure Active Directory.
You can see that I've got a lot of internal users
in my tenant, and here I've got one with a globe here
and that is actually an external user.
I've already set that user up.
And what I can do here from an IT perspective,
if I want, I can go ahead and add a new guest user.
And what that does, it basically triggers a process
where I can add a user, if I want to add something
in any email address, then I can invite that person in
and when I click Invite, they'll basically get an invite
sent from me to be able to sign in
and, kind of, broker that connection
between their Azure Active Directory,
their organizational ID, and ours.
Now, as part of this also, what we can do is use Power BI
to that sharing, right?
- Yeah, that's useful if you're trying to pre-add
like a bulk set of users ahead of time as an admin.
But I can do something as an ad hoc user as well.
So as I'm just a user in Power BI,
whenever I come to share, actually I cannot type in
anybody's email address here, any email address at all,
even something outside of my organization,
and that will generate an email invitation
and kick off, kind of, the same workflow.
I'd only be doing that if I was using Power BI Pro
or if my work content's on Power BI Premium.
- And really, and this is, again, Pro to Pro,
or going Premium to somebody outside
of the kind of Power BI Pro user group.
Now here in Azure AD again,
what I can do if I want to as well,
in terms of setting up the different permissions,
I can also do things like control exactly
what external sharing is enabled for my tenant.
So I can set these things up to suit my specific needs
and my information protection requirements
from my organization.
All these controls are here inside of user settings
with an Azure ID.
Right, so in this case, obviously,
the more we start sharing our reports externally
and to other stakeholders, the more demand
we're gonna create for these reports, right?
- Yeah, that's right.
As we've seen many, many organizations running
their operations with Power BI,
we've actually introduced an option
that can give you more dependable performance
and the ability to analyze a report
of a really, really large data volume.
Typically, when you're creating Power BI reports,
your workloads are running on the same computation
of resources as those shared by other customers.
And we call this a shared capacity.
With Power BI Premium, on the other hand,
you get what we call a premium capacity.
And this is essentially dedicated resources
for your whole organization or for specific divisions
within your organization.
And that can service all of their different reports
and needs.
And they can even subscribe to different capacity tiers.
Depending on the capacity that you select,
that can scale your data to hundreds of millions of rows.
For example, we've been able to store every taxi trip taken
in New York City since 2009.
It's a huge volume of data.
And for the Power BI admin portal,
I can see the capacities that I've got management access to.
When I click on one of these,
I'll see even things like the CPU and memory utilization
for that capacity's hardware.
- Now as a Power BI user, how do I go about tracking
the usage and whether or not people are actually
consuming my reports?
- Yeah, so for individual reports and dashboards,
anybody who owns one of those reports can click
this little usage icon, and that will generate
the usage metrics report about the report you clicked on.
It's really better.
Reporting on my report.
- [Jeremy] Right.
- And this shows me everything,
like the number of views per day,
or the number of unique viewers per day,
and I can do things like slicing and filtering
if I learn that they are using mobile or web or whatever,
even down to the individual report page
that they were looking at.
This is kind of a read-only report,
but I can also hit Save As and create a copy of it.
And then I can go to town.
I've got all of the data there
and I can create whatever reports, whatever metrics I want
to help me track usage in my report.
- And you have the right tool to start creating reports
from that data.
- Right, exactly, called Power BI.
- So, a really great set of updates that you shared today.
So where would people go, then, to get started
with all of this and learn more?
- Yeah, it's really simple.
You can go to PowerBI.com to learn more
and to get started for free.
Or you can visit us on YouTube.
Just find the Power BI channel
and you can get a whole host of additional tutorials,
if you're not fed up with listening to me already.
- Alright, and of course, you can keep watching
and subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest updates.
That's all the time we have for this show.
Thanks for watching.
We'll see you next time.
(techno music)