Relational Database Analytics and Uncovering Actionable Insights with Power BI

In today's data-driven world, many businesses rely on centrally governed data sources built by professional developers. However, this can lead to drawbacks such as delayed reporting and analysis, and users resorting to building their own data models using tools like Access, SharePoint, or spreadsheets. These solutions lack important capabilities, perform poorly, don't scale with growing data volumes and user base, and can be challenging to govern.

The latest update to Power BI aims to address these problems by giving users more hands-on freedom and independence in building the data they need for reports. With this out-of-the-box tool, users can extract information from different sources or a data warehouse, transform and load it into something specific for their own use. This allows even non-technical users to create custom dashboards and visualizations, regardless of their experience with SQL.

This feature update will definitely help overburdened IT teams with smaller tasks such as combining two data sources or cleaning up a data source. By providing users with more freedom and independence, Power BI enables them to work on these tasks quickly, without having to rely on the development team. This means that reporting and analysis can be done faster, and users can get the insights they need sooner.

To use this feature effectively, analysts will need to learn some new skills. They will still require certain information from their IT department or database administrators to connect to different data sources. Microsoft has a wealth of documentation and resources available, including Data Camp's courses in their Power BI Data Analyst Track, which provide more information on how to connect to various data sources.

Another exciting feature announced is the Metrics feature, previously known as Goals. This feature aims to make business scorecarding and benchmarking easier and more intuitive. One of the most highly anticipated capabilities is the ability to create cascading scorecards that roll up along hierarchies in your data. This new "Hierarchies" feature enables users to set up a hierarchy for a scorecard and map the Power BI datasets referenced by Metrics in the scorecard to the hierarchy.

This means that metrics being tracked can be directly connected to categorical values, such as grades or compliance ratings, which are not numerical. Similarly, survey results can be based on categories like "Highly Satisfied" to "Zero Highly Unsatisfied". The new Metrics feature allows users to create Matrix reports to track these categorical values.

For businesses adopting this feature, it will provide a wealth of value and is an exciting development for companies looking to implement OKR planning. By integrating Power BI with their existing Office 365 setup, teams can easily communicate analysis from Power BI through emails and chats, and even add Power BI content to Outlook emails as adaptive cards.

Finally, the Power BI Personal App will be integrated into the Office Hub, enabling users to find, consume, and create Power BI content directly within Outlook. When an email contains Power BI content, it will open in Outlook, allowing users to access Power BI without switching apps. This integration is a significant development that makes it easier for teams to work with Power BI within their existing workflow.

Conclusion

The latest update to Power BI has brought several exciting features that aim to make data analysis and visualization more intuitive and accessible. By giving users more freedom and independence in building the data they need, Power BI enables them to work more efficiently and effectively. The integration with Office Hub and Outlook will further enhance the user experience, making it easier for teams to communicate and collaborate with Power BI insights.

Overall, this update is a significant development that can help businesses unlock the full potential of their data. With its capabilities in metrics, hierarchies, and integrations, Power BI is poised to become an essential tool for data analysis and visualization in the years to come.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi there everyone welcome to this special edition of the weekly roundup we're going to be using special editions as a way of sharing big breaking news stories that happen outside of our weekly news cycle we'll be diving a little bit deeper in these episodes and chatting to some of our in-house experts to give you more context and help you stay in the loop so make sure you're subscribed on whatever platform you're using and give us a shout out in the comments if you like the episode microsoft have just announced their biggest update in three years and have clearly been listening closely to feedback from both individual users and businesses power bi will be receiving a host of new features and updates that'll be rolled out over the coming months the first big feature on the list is native power bi integration into powerpoint microsoft have realized that users are frequently creating presentations based on power bi insights but normally have to take a screenshot or copy and paste a graph to do so now the firm is adding the ability to embed live interactive power bi reports directly in powerpoint presentations as presentation attendees react to the insights you're sharing you can interact with the visuals and change the data using slices filters and drill down mechanisms to dive deeper and make decisions without ever having to leave powerpoint or struggling to format a screenshot in addition to an embedded power bi report in powerpoint microsoft have included another feature that our in-house expert js will explain for us you can have it both static so that you know it won't update when people see it um but you can also then just like they say like freeze and unfreeze it and then be able to kind of get the most updated view which i think is really good for like regular meetings so if you've got like a regular i know marketing meeting you can have a snapshot as it was in that day and then refresh it the next month and then just write your dialogue alongside it of what happened our power bi experts here at datacamp are also super excited about this integration and how it will make life easier for analysts so yeah i'm excited to see that and um i've still got a lot of people that are friends in the industry so who will probably get more use fit now than i will because obviously i'm not an analyst but um hopefully i'll get to teach some stuff around it i'm sure it's going to help a lot of kind of more insight analysts data analyst roles who do use power bi but also have to do that kind of more presentation style storytelling to an audience that might not have access to the actual tool so that's that definitely something that looks exciting the next major feature in the announcement is datamod in power bi a new power bi premium self-service capability that enables users to perform relational database analytics and uncover actionable insights from their data let's unpack what that means in today's world many businesses rely on centrally governed data sources built by professional developers the drawback of this is that when a user needs something changed like a new source of data or a different combination of data they'd have to submit a request to the development team when it teams get overburdened this means that either reporting and analysis is delayed or users resort to building their own data mod to get things done using tools like an access database a sharepoint site or a spreadsheet these solutions lack important capabilities perform poorly don't scale as data volumes and users grow and can be pretty hard to govern yes and how does this update help fix these problems it does give users of power bi the ability to do things more hands-on more on their own in terms of taking information and data from different sources or a data warehouse and then extracting the information they need transforming and loading into something that's more specific for their own use for a report so it might be for a specific subject again a lot of companies have data in lots of different sources so being able to combine it with this kind of out of the box tool that power bi is offering gives a user whether experienced in sql or not a lot more freedom and independence in building the data that they want to report and analyze and visualize would this help overburdened it teams um i think it will for the kind of smaller tasks sure there have been large companies where it will have a lot more longer term projects they'll be working on so when you're going with a small oh i want to combine these two data sources or can you clean this data source for me all this data it will take away the need for those little tasks that get pushed back because they might not be as high priority so it definitely kind of gives the the data analyst or the bi analyst or the power bi user whatever role they're in a lot more freedom to do things quicker for themselves so what skills would analysts need to learn to use these features and where could they start looking for information about power bi in terms of getting the data you obviously still need certain information from your i t department or your database administrators obviously microsoft has a lot of documentation and resources based on data source and data connections data camp also has courses in our power bi data analyst track where you can again get more information on how to connect to different data sources if you're using databases though you will need some for company databases you will need some form of credentials so that's why an it department will still be necessary for you to get those next on the list of new features is metrics previously known as goals the metrics feature is aimed at making business scorecarding and benchmarking easier and more intuitive one of the most highly anticipated capabilities for the matrix feature in power bi has been the ability to create cascading scorecards that roll up along hierarchies in your data this new hierarchies feature enables you to set up a hierarchy for a scorecard and map the power bi datasets referenced by matrix in the scorecard to the hierarchy oftentimes a metric being tracked doesn't have a numerical value for example a grade or compliance rating might be tracked with a set of categorical values such as a b c d or f similarly a metric that's tracking survey results might be based on categories such as five highly satisfied to zero highly unsatisfied the new metrics feature allows users to create matrix to directly track these categorical values jess can you tell us what this means for businesses i think for businesses who are going to be using it they'll get some really good value out there and i think more businesses should adopt it um even just like for okr planning um you know we always most teams tend to manage it in the next cell um but being able to connect it all up to your power bi your whole power bi setup and platform i think will you know especially for companies that are microsoft like powerhouse they'll really be able to get some good you know integration with their their okrs for sure the last big feature announced is power bi integration with outlook and office hub similarly to the powerpoint integration microsoft has realized that people within businesses are communicating analysis from power bi through things like emails and chats to better facilitate this the power bi personal app will be integrated into the office hub enabling users to find consume and create power bi content from outlook microsoft are also making it easy to find and add power bi content to outlook emails as adaptive cards the power bi content included in emails will open an outlook allowing users to access power bi without switching apps that's all for this special edition of the weekly roundup we hope you enjoyed it let us know in the comments what your thoughts are on the power bi update and don't forget to subscribe on whatever platform you're watching this to stay in the loop with the latest and greatest in data sciencehi there everyone welcome to this special edition of the weekly roundup we're going to be using special editions as a way of sharing big breaking news stories that happen outside of our weekly news cycle we'll be diving a little bit deeper in these episodes and chatting to some of our in-house experts to give you more context and help you stay in the loop so make sure you're subscribed on whatever platform you're using and give us a shout out in the comments if you like the episode microsoft have just announced their biggest update in three years and have clearly been listening closely to feedback from both individual users and businesses power bi will be receiving a host of new features and updates that'll be rolled out over the coming months the first big feature on the list is native power bi integration into powerpoint microsoft have realized that users are frequently creating presentations based on power bi insights but normally have to take a screenshot or copy and paste a graph to do so now the firm is adding the ability to embed live interactive power bi reports directly in powerpoint presentations as presentation attendees react to the insights you're sharing you can interact with the visuals and change the data using slices filters and drill down mechanisms to dive deeper and make decisions without ever having to leave powerpoint or struggling to format a screenshot in addition to an embedded power bi report in powerpoint microsoft have included another feature that our in-house expert js will explain for us you can have it both static so that you know it won't update when people see it um but you can also then just like they say like freeze and unfreeze it and then be able to kind of get the most updated view which i think is really good for like regular meetings so if you've got like a regular i know marketing meeting you can have a snapshot as it was in that day and then refresh it the next month and then just write your dialogue alongside it of what happened our power bi experts here at datacamp are also super excited about this integration and how it will make life easier for analysts so yeah i'm excited to see that and um i've still got a lot of people that are friends in the industry so who will probably get more use fit now than i will because obviously i'm not an analyst but um hopefully i'll get to teach some stuff around it i'm sure it's going to help a lot of kind of more insight analysts data analyst roles who do use power bi but also have to do that kind of more presentation style storytelling to an audience that might not have access to the actual tool so that's that definitely something that looks exciting the next major feature in the announcement is datamod in power bi a new power bi premium self-service capability that enables users to perform relational database analytics and uncover actionable insights from their data let's unpack what that means in today's world many businesses rely on centrally governed data sources built by professional developers the drawback of this is that when a user needs something changed like a new source of data or a different combination of data they'd have to submit a request to the development team when it teams get overburdened this means that either reporting and analysis is delayed or users resort to building their own data mod to get things done using tools like an access database a sharepoint site or a spreadsheet these solutions lack important capabilities perform poorly don't scale as data volumes and users grow and can be pretty hard to govern yes and how does this update help fix these problems it does give users of power bi the ability to do things more hands-on more on their own in terms of taking information and data from different sources or a data warehouse and then extracting the information they need transforming and loading into something that's more specific for their own use for a report so it might be for a specific subject again a lot of companies have data in lots of different sources so being able to combine it with this kind of out of the box tool that power bi is offering gives a user whether experienced in sql or not a lot more freedom and independence in building the data that they want to report and analyze and visualize would this help overburdened it teams um i think it will for the kind of smaller tasks sure there have been large companies where it will have a lot more longer term projects they'll be working on so when you're going with a small oh i want to combine these two data sources or can you clean this data source for me all this data it will take away the need for those little tasks that get pushed back because they might not be as high priority so it definitely kind of gives the the data analyst or the bi analyst or the power bi user whatever role they're in a lot more freedom to do things quicker for themselves so what skills would analysts need to learn to use these features and where could they start looking for information about power bi in terms of getting the data you obviously still need certain information from your i t department or your database administrators obviously microsoft has a lot of documentation and resources based on data source and data connections data camp also has courses in our power bi data analyst track where you can again get more information on how to connect to different data sources if you're using databases though you will need some for company databases you will need some form of credentials so that's why an it department will still be necessary for you to get those next on the list of new features is metrics previously known as goals the metrics feature is aimed at making business scorecarding and benchmarking easier and more intuitive one of the most highly anticipated capabilities for the matrix feature in power bi has been the ability to create cascading scorecards that roll up along hierarchies in your data this new hierarchies feature enables you to set up a hierarchy for a scorecard and map the power bi datasets referenced by matrix in the scorecard to the hierarchy oftentimes a metric being tracked doesn't have a numerical value for example a grade or compliance rating might be tracked with a set of categorical values such as a b c d or f similarly a metric that's tracking survey results might be based on categories such as five highly satisfied to zero highly unsatisfied the new metrics feature allows users to create matrix to directly track these categorical values jess can you tell us what this means for businesses i think for businesses who are going to be using it they'll get some really good value out there and i think more businesses should adopt it um even just like for okr planning um you know we always most teams tend to manage it in the next cell um but being able to connect it all up to your power bi your whole power bi setup and platform i think will you know especially for companies that are microsoft like powerhouse they'll really be able to get some good you know integration with their their okrs for sure the last big feature announced is power bi integration with outlook and office hub similarly to the powerpoint integration microsoft has realized that people within businesses are communicating analysis from power bi through things like emails and chats to better facilitate this the power bi personal app will be integrated into the office hub enabling users to find consume and create power bi content from outlook microsoft are also making it easy to find and add power bi content to outlook emails as adaptive cards the power bi content included in emails will open an outlook allowing users to access power bi without switching apps that's all for this special edition of the weekly roundup we hope you enjoyed it let us know in the comments what your thoughts are on the power bi update and don't forget to subscribe on whatever platform you're watching this to stay in the loop with the latest and greatest in data science\n"