I just finished watching the presentation from James Phillips – GM of Power BI at Microsoft from PASS Summit 2015. He talks about the incredible progress that Microsoft has made this year in the BI space, particularly with Power BI, but importantly about the future of Business Intelligence at Microsoft.
Embed Excel coming soon
Yahhh, can’t wait. The reason I think this is so important is it will close all the current gaps that Power BI has. Over time as Power BI gets better, this will become less important, but for now it will make a huge difference immediately. I will migrate customers to Power BI the same day this is available.
Other Key Highlights from the Video include
- Microsoft is actually delivering, and industry analysts are noticing.
- The world will be creating more data than ever in the future, and we need new tools to make sense of it.
- The journey from Corporate BI, to Self Service BI for Analysts, to End User BI
- Plans to integrate SSRS with Power BI before the end of 2015
- A very cool demo (at about 22 min mark) showing a real time dashboard of people shopping in a store using Kinect Sensors
- Insights generating capabilities (released later this year)
- QR code scanning to pull up a real time chart on a mobile device
- New improved formatting of DAX in SQL 2016, coming soon to Power BI Desktop
- New Caching to Power BI Desktop
- Datazen and the Mobile Apps will be merged by the end of this year into a single product
- Integration of R into Power BI Desktop
- The Power BI Visuals Gallery – I blogged about how great this is here
- New capability to pin an entire report to a Dashboard – YAAAAH!!! Coming very soon
- The ability to upload Excel Workbooks to Power BI. BRING IT ON.
- Insert Power BI tile to Power Point using an addin
The session is available to watch on YouTube below.
Was there any mention of connecting Excel to the Power BI Desktop Data model directly (without workarounds)
Sam, I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying you want yo build a data model in Power BI desktop, Ie not Excel, and then connect a blank workbook to the data model and create pivot tables? Why is this better than creating in Excel?
You get a tremendous reduction in File Sizes !!!
Take this Example :
Excel File – 20 MB
PBI – having the Data model – pulling Data from the Excel file – 600 KB
Another Excel File connected to the PBIX file – 20 kB !!!!
(via a work around of using the volatile server name (localhost:xxxxx) obtained from DAX Studio)
This way
a) You don’t have to worry about corruption of the Data model
b) You don’t have to migrate to 64 Bit office and can still handle large data – because the PBI Desktop is 64 bit (because Win is 64 bit)
c) The Report File is very very portable
So now Power BI Desktop becomes a place to Aggregate Data + Complex Transformations + Measures
And Excel just becomes a front end (Pivot Table) to see the results
Let me know if you want me to email you a working demo (you need to install DAX Studio to make it work)