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Introduction
Over the past few years, the concept of self-service business intelligence (BI) has taken over the corporate world. Self-service BI is a form of business intelligence in which end users can independently generate their own reports, run their own queries, and conduct their own analyses, without the need to engage the IT department.
The demand for self-service BI is a direct result of several factors:
More power users: Organizations are realizing that no single enterprise reporting system or BI tool can accommodate all their users. Predefined reports and high-level dashboards may be sufficient for casual users, but a large portion of today’s users are savvy enough to be considered power users. Power users have a greater understanding of data analysis and prefer to perform their own analysis, often within Excel.
Changing analytical needs: In the past, business intelligence primarily consisted of IT-managed dashboards showing historic data on an agreed-upon set of key performance metrics. Managers now demand more dynamic predictive analysis, the ability to perform data discovery iteratively, and the freedom to take the hard left and right turns on data presentation. These managers often turn to Excel to provide the needed analytics and visualization tools.
Speed of BI: Users are increasingly dissatisfied with the inability of IT to quickly deliver new reporting and metrics. Most traditional BI implementations fail specifically because the need for changes and answers to new questions overwhelmingly outpaces the IT department’s ability to deliver them. As a result, users often find ways to work around the perceived IT bottleneck and ultimately build their own shadow BI (under the radar) solutions in Excel.
Recognizing the importance of the self-service BI revolution and the role Excel plays in it, Microsoft has made substantial investments in making Excel a player in the self-service BI arena by embedding both Power Pivot and Power Query directly into Excel.
You can integrate multiple data sources, define relationships between data sources, process analysis services cubes, and develop interactive dashboards that can be shared on the web. Indeed, the new Microsoft BI tools blur the line between Excel analysis and what is traditionally IT enterprise-level data management and reporting capabilities.
With these new tools in the Excel wheelhouse, it’s becoming important for business analysts to expand their skill sets to new territory, including database management, query design, data integration, multidimensional reporting, and a host of other skills. Excel analysts have to expand their skill set knowledge base from the one-dimensional spreadsheets to relational databases, data integration, and multidimensional reporting.
That’s where this book comes in. Here, you’re introduced to the mysterious world of Power Pivot and Power Query. You find out how to leverage the rich set of tools and reporting capabilities to save time, automate data clean-up, and substantially enhance your data analysis and reporting capabilities.
About This Book
The goal of this book is to give you a solid overview of the self-service BI functionality offered by Power Pivot and Power Query. Each chapter guides you through practical techniques that enable you to
Extract data from databases and external files for use in Excel reporting
Scrape and import data from the web
Build automated processes to clean and transform data
Easily slice data into various views on the fly, gaining visibility from different perspectives
Analyze large amounts of data and report them in a meaningful way
Create powerful, interactive reporting mechanisms and dashboards
Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.
Foolish Assumptions
Over the past few years, Microsoft has adopted an agile release cycle, allowing the company to release updates to Microsoft Office and the power BI tools practically monthly. This is great news for those who love seeing new features added to Power Pivot and Power Query. (It’s not-so-great news if you’re trying to document the features of these tools in a book.)
My assumption is that Microsoft will continue to add new bells and whistles to Power Pivot and Power Query at a rapid pace after publication of this book. So you may encounter new functionality not covered here.
The good news is that both Power Pivot and Power Query have stabilized and already have a broad feature set. So I’m also assuming that although changes will be made to these tools, they won’t be so drastic as to turn this book into a doorstop. The core functionality covered in these chapters will remain relevant — even if the mechanics change a bit.
Icons Used in This Book
As you look in various places in this book, you see icons in the margins that indicate material of interest (or not, as the case may be). This section briefly describes each icon in this book.
