An interesting enhancement to functionality in the latest PowerPivot release is Sort by Column. In PowerPivot you could sort your data alphabetically, in ascending/descending order and this worked perfectly. That is until you came to things like dates. I would like to show my data in order of Month Name, Day of the Week. Members in a slicer treat this data as a string value to be sorted in alphabetical order (like the example below).
In a previous post I gave a high level summary of a number of the new features in Microsoft PowerPivot v2. One of the simplest but perhaps most powerful is the ability to view your relationships in a Diagrammatic View (much like our standard Entity-Relationship Software).
After sitting in on a recent webinar looking at new features for Microsoft PowerPivot 2012 (v2) and a new product called PowerView I could not help but be impressed. PowerPivot has been around for a while now but PowerView is a new feature part of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 that must also run with SharePoint Enterprise Server. Although I'll not be covering PowerView in this blog (I'll discuss that in my next one) it's clear to say that this is a highly intuitive and interactive reporting tool that allows you to create rich and dynamic visualisations over the web.
I've prepared another YouTube video for the Maxima Channel this week inviting current, past and future clients to the Microsoft Customer Immersion Experience in the heart of Edinburgh. You can view it here - think I'm getting better at these but need some proper lighting next time!
Well that’s my summer holidays over with. What to start the second half of 2011 with? How about something interesting, new, nice and free from Microsoft? The Microsoft BI Labs are a relatively recent innvoation to their main BI site (found here) ) and are described as "a collection of experimental business intelligence projects and useful applications made available from internal sources across Microsoft." Nothing in here is a product as such but it will hopefully build to form a useful collection of materials showcasing what's possible with the Microsoft BI suite and, ideally, triggering inspirational activity in real world deployments. Already there's a useful SQL Server Reporting Services Log Viewer and MDX formatter but, for this blog, I'm going to focus on one of their PowerPivot application demos – Analytics for Twitter.
Spilling data all over the Internet has been quite the conversation piece for the past few weeks thanks to Wikileaks. Gaining rather less worldwide media attention however has been the opening of Microsoft’s Azure DataMarket - https://datamarket.azure.com/ - which allows businesses and individuals to buy datasets made legally available by other businesses and individuals. It seems to me that this marks a significant threshold in the commoditisation of data and a clear reminder of why the challenges of delivering sustainable Business Intelligence are as relevant as ever. Companies no longer have just their own internal data to look after – they need to be keeping an eye on the potential for competitive advantage, operational efficiency and enhanced bottom line that integrating external data offers as well.
One of the real privileges about working for a Business Intelligence Consultancy is getting to speak to folk on the inside track of our partner technologies about how companies are using their existing technologies and where they are anticipating future product development to head. It’s an aim of the Maxima BO Blog to share, where possible, these insights with our wider client and associate community so here’s a transcript of a recent email interview between myself and Jess Meats, one of our BI Partner Technology Advisers at Microsoft.
One of the exciting things about being a Microsoft BI partner is how many solutions they actually provide. A recent addition to the pack is the long awaited PowerPivot described in it’s online help tool as “a data analysis tool that delivers unmatched computational power directly within the application that you already know and love—Microsoft Excel”. Excel Love eh? For many in BI that’s the love that dare not speak it’s name but I think PowerPivot is going to bring it a renewed focus. The question is whether it’s impact will be a positive or negative one.
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