A couple of weeks ago Microsoft held a full day online session called Faster Data Insights With Power BI. There were 8 sessions of about 50 mins each that covered various aspects of the new Power BI suite. The sessions have now been converted to YouTube videos and are available from this YouTube Channel Playlist. Each video in the series starts with the text “Faster Data Insights…”
For those that want to learn more about the capabilities of these tools, these videos are a great resource. I particularly recommend watching numbers 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7 (although they all have relevance) – here is what you will see in these videos.
Faster Data Insights with Power BI, 01, Introduction to Power BI
This video is a general overview of the Power BI suite. It explains how each product in the suite does a particular job in the end to end data analysis process. There are some very high level examples of each tool.
Faster Data Insights with Power BI, 02, Drilldown on Data Discovery Using Power Query
This video is one of my favourites. It shows a deep dive on Power Query from Matt Masson and he demonstrates the breadth of capability of this tool. As of March 2014, Power Query is in a very fast development cycle with new releases coming out every month.
Faster Data Insights with Power BI, 03, The Data Stewardship Experience
This is a really important video, because it talks about Data Stewardship and how the Power BI – particularly the cloud based offering plays a role in making Power BI and enterprise strength tool.
Faster Data Insights with Power BI, 04, Building Stellar Data Visualizations Using Power View
In this session, Sandy Rivas demos the features of Power View. There are good examples of the visualisation capabilities of this tool.
Faster Data Insights with Power BI, 05, Building 3D Visualizations Using Power Map
Personally I think Power Map is the least exciting tool in the suite. However it is a good tool if you need to visualise geospatial and temporal data – this video shows you what it can do.
Faster Data Insights with Power BI, 06, Understanding Power BI Sites and Mobile BI
This video builds on video 3, and goes into a lot more depth on how the cloud version of Power BI can add value to the organisation. There are lots of great examples of visualisation capabilities but also the share and reapply capabilities. Towards the end of the end of the video it talks about browser support and also mobile device support. Unfortunately no iPad support as at March 2014, but the video quotes “this year” for delivery of that.
Faster Data Insights with Power BI, 07, Working with Natural Language Querying Using Q&A
The natural language query tool shows a lot of promise. This features basically allows you to load your data and reports into Power BI, and then allow users to type a natural language question in a browser, and get a visualisation that answers the question.
Faster Data Insights with Power BI, 08, Handling Data Management Gateway
This last video is quite technical, and describes how to set up Power BI for use in the Enterprise, how you can manage security and availability of the data. This is not a video for the average desktop user unless you want to know what can be done.
Power Query is awesome. I plan to spend more time myself in the coming months learning about PQ, and then I hope to share some more usage tips on my blog.
Look forward to that! I will also start my learning on PQ!
Hi Matt! I just finished the power query part. It is so powerful!
I used to resist query things because I think it was all about programming.
Thanks for your sharing! I will keep watching the other videos!