New Book – Visual Intelligence: Microsoft Tools and Techniques for Visualizing Data

I just found out this week that the book Visual Intelligence: Microsoft Tools and Techniques for Visualizing Data was available on the Amazon for the Kindle and also in paperback now. 

When I got home from work last night there was a package waiting for me and it was my own personal copy of the book:)

I had the pleasure of being one of the technical editors on the book

As well as a contributor where I got to work on one of the chapters, so you get to see some of my handy work as well, guess which chapter;)

And I greatly appreciate Mark’s acknowledgment and allowing me to work on the book

The authors of the book are from Pragmatic Works – Mark Stacey, Joe Salvatore, and Adam Jorgensen.

Here is the description of the book from Amazon:

Go beyond design concepts and learn to build state-of-the-art visualizations

The visualization experts at Microsoft’s Pragmatic Works have created a full-color, step-by-step guide to building specific types of visualizations. The book thoroughly covers the Microsoft toolset for data analysis and visualization, including Excel, and explores best practices for choosing a data visualization design, selecting tools from the Microsoft stack, and building a dynamic data visualization from start to finish. You’ll examine different types of visualizations, their strengths and weaknesses, and when to use each one.

• Data visualization tools unlock the stories within the data, enabling you to present it in a way that is useful for making business decisions
• This full-color guide introduces data visualization design concepts, then explains the various Microsoft tools used to store and display data
• Features a detailed discussion of various classes of visualizations, their uses, and the appropriate tools for each
• Includes practical implementations of various visualizations and best practices for using them
• Covers out-of-the-box Microsoft tools, custom-developed illustrations and implementations, and code examples

Visual Intelligence: Microsoft Tools and Techniques for Visualizing Data arms you with best practices and the knowledge to choose and build dynamic data visualizations.

I would highly recommend getting your copy in either paperback or electronic format and checking it out.  Both versions are in full color, very nice:)

Visual Intelligence: Microsoft Tools and Techniques for Visualizing Data

MN Microsoft BI User Group Official Chapter of PASS!

Just a quick announcement that I am happy to announce, yesterday the Minnesota Microsoft Business Intelligence (MSBIMN) user group completed the process and is now officially affiliated with the national PASS association.  The user group is part of the U.S. North Central region.  I am really excited about this and looking forward to another exciting year in 2013 when we resume our meetings.  You can check out the content from our 2011 and 2012 meetings here – past presentation content.

The Leadership Team

• Neelesh Raheja, GNet Group
• Dan English, Superior Consulting Services
• Terry McDonald, Pentair Technical Products
• Jin Cho, Microsoft

2013 Meeting Schedule

• Tuesday, March 5
• Tuesday, June 4
• Tuesday, September 10
• Tuesday, December 3

In 2013 we are also planning on organizing a couple of special session meetings, stay tuned for information about those as well and to stay in touch don’t forget we also have a group setup on LinkedIn that you can get associated with.

Thanks to everyone on the Leadership Team, the speakers, and the user group for another great year! 

Happy holidays to everyone and see you all next year!

Minnesota Microsoft BI User Group 2012 Q4 Meeting–Dec 4

The next MN Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group is coming up on Tuesday, December 4. This meeting we will have two sessions starting out with a talk on Data Mining and then a presentation about new Business Intelligence features in Office 2013, SharePoint 2013, and SQL Server 2012 SP1. Just a reminder that the location for this event is at the Microsoft Technology Center location in Edina.  Please register so that we can have your name badge pre-printed.

MN Microsoft BI User Group 2012 Q4 Meeting

Sponsored by:

Date: Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Check In: 2:30 PM Event Time: 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Location: Microsoft Technology Center – 3601 76th St W, Suite 600 Edina MN 55435 (in LOW 1, 2, and 3)

To join via Live Meeting click here.

Please Register Now (Please register so that we can have your name badge pre-printed)

Agenda:

• 2:30-3:00 : Registration
• 3:00-3:15 : Microsoft BI User Group Updates & Announcements
• 3:15-4:15 : Data Mining with the Tools You Already Have (Steve Hughes)
• 4:15-4:30 : Break
• 4:30-5:30 : What’s New in Business Intelligence in Office 2013, SharePoint Server 2013, and SQL Server 2012 SP1 (Jin Cho)
• 5:30-6:00 : Social and Networking

Presentations:

Data Mining with the Tools You Already Have – This session will cover data mining and using predictive analytics with tools you already use. We will cover using both Excel and Analysis Services to use data mining to make your data work for you. We will cover some of the commonly used algorithms built right into the tools such as Decision Trees, Clustering, and Neural Networking. We will explain use cases for the algorithms as well as demo the fun you can have exploring and forecasting with your data.

Steve Hughes (@DataOnWheels) is a Practice Lead at Magenic. His area of expertise is in data and business intelligence architecture on the Microsoft SQL Server platform. He was also the data architect for a SaaS company which delivered a transportation management solution for fleets across the United States. Steve has co-authored two books and delivered more than 30 presentations on SQL Server and data architecture over the past six years.  He also provides insights from the field on his blog at http://www.dataonwheels.com.

What’s New in Business Intelligence in Office 2013, SharePoint Server 2013, and SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 – Come and find out how the Office 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 integrated analytics platform that allows your organization to discover and share business insights in dynamic environments.  We will provide demos of the new Business Intelligence capabilities from the Office 2013, SharePoint 2013 and SQL Server 2012 SP1. 

Jin Cho, Microsoft Business Intelligence Technology Specialist, evangelizes on Business Intelligence capabilities for suite of Microsoft products for the last 4 years.  Jin has proven ability to deliver Business intelligence solutions utilizing leading market BI technologies.  Prior to becoming a Microsoft employee, Jin spent 11 years at Allina Health System.  He led the Business Intelligence/Data Warehouse team on an effort to provide clinical, financial, and operational BI solutions.  He was also responsible for implementing reporting and analytic environment for the Epic electronic medical record system.  Jin has bachelor degree in Statistics from the University of Minnesota.

Please Register Now (Please register so that we can have your name badge pre-printed)

Hope to see you there!

Minnesota Microsoft BI User Group 2012 Q3 Meeting–Sept 5

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The next MN Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group is coming up next week on Wednesday, September 5. This meeting we will have two sessions starting out with a talk on Tabular Analysis Services and then a presentation about Big Data. Just a reminder that the location for this event is at the Microsoft Technology Center location in Edina.

MN Microsoft BI User Group 2012 Q3 Meeting

Sponsored by:

Date: Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Check In: 2:30 PM Event Time: 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Location: Microsoft Technology Center – 3601 76th St W, Suite 600 Edina MN 55435 (in LOW 1, 2, and 3)

To join via Lync Click Here

Please Register Now

Agenda:

• 2:30-3:00 : Registration
• 3:00-3:15 : Microsoft BI User Group Updates & Announcements
• 3:15-4:15 : Tabular BI Semantic Model – What? When? Where? Why? How? (William Weber)
• 4:15-4:30 : Break
• 4:30-5:30 : Big Data Buzzwords (Lara Rubbelke)
• 5:30-6:00 : Social and Networking

Presentations:

Tabular BI Semantic Model – What? When? Where? Why? How? – When we’re building a new business intelligence solution we have a lot of options in SQL 2012. PowerPivot in Excel or SharePoint. SSAS multidimensional or tabular. When do we choose a tabular model over a multidimensional model, and why? What, if anything, do we sacrifice in doing so? How do we get started – through a promoted PowerPivot model or a new SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) project? Let’s take one scenario – a new tabular model started from brand new SSDT project – and walk through the decision making and development process. Not every tabular BI solution has to start in PowerPivot. Tabular models are a first-class citizen in SQL 2012, with all sorts of bells and whistles that we’ve typically reserved for multidimensional solutions. We’ll start with a new project, talk about storage and query access models, security, end-user reporting and walk-through building it all. And if there’s time left, we’ll take a quick look at a couple of additional tools that can really help along the way.

William Weber (@WilliamWeber) is a business intelligence consultant at RBA Inc. He started his career as a professional juggler. Almost got a degree in Theatre. Actually got a degree in Chinese. And now builds business intelligence solutions for clients all around the Twin Cities.

Big Data Buzzwords – Do terms like Oozie make you woozie? Does Pig make you grunt? Are your customers buzzing about Hive? Hadoop has many data professionals trying to understand the new world of technologies to help deploy, develop, manage and integrate these new data sources. In this session we will make sense of these and other Big Data terms and tools, helping you understand the new world of Hadoop.

Lara Rubbelke (@SQLGal) brings her passion for architecting, implementing and improving data solutions to the community as a Principal Program Manager for Microsoft. Her expertise involves Big Data, data management, security and compliance, ETL, and the Business Intelligence lifecycle. She regularly delivers technical presentations at local, regional and national conferences, user groups and webcasts.

Please Register Now

Hope to see you there!

Power View meet Microsoft Excel 2013 Part 2

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Last week I did my initial post of going over using Power View inside of Excel 2013 – Power View meet Microsoft Excel 2013.  In that post I went over how I converted the PowerPivot model of the Pan-Geo Hospitality & Travel that was used in our Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View book (well at least a Tabular SSAS version was used, I recreated the entire model in PowerPivot).  I upgraded that model to use the Excel 2013 version of PowerPivot and then showcased some of the new features such as:

• Background Images
• Pictures
• Themes
• Relationships
• Pie Charts
• Map Visualizations (Bing Maps)
• Key Performance Indicators

So what other key features are that that might be of interest?  Hmmm, good question.  And yes, there are more features.  Have you been wanting support for hierarchies?  What about drill up and down capabilities?  Well guess what, you get them both:)

You might have noticed in the previous post that you saw some hierarchies listed in the field list:

Let’s take a quick look at using the Country Hierarchy and see how this looks in a table, matrix, and a chart.

Table

Matrix

Chart

So in the table and matrix no change other than the fact that we can see our hierarchies in the field list and select them.  This allows us to quickly add multiple fields to the canvas.  What about the chart though?  I picked the country hierarchy, but I am only seeing the first level of the hierarchy which are the continents.  Where are the countries?

Well if you double click on the columns in the chart it will actually drill down into that continent and display the data for the countries!

You will also see that the sort by and title text changed to display country and there is a new icon available when you hover over the chart, an arrow that provides drill up functionality.  So the drill up will bring you back up to continent. 

Now the neat thing about the drill up and down functionality is that you can expand on this.  The fields do not necessarily need to be part of a hierarchy, you can actually build out the drill up and down capabilities by adding fields into the field well.  So in this example I will add more fields into the chart below the country:

So let’s double click a few times to see what we get:

Now the one thing is that we really are not sure what we are looking at, meaning that what continent, country, and chain type did we select previously?  I can see based on the sort the trail that I have navigated, but what were the values associated with them.  That would be a nice feature.

The drill down also works for the map reports as well.

So if we double click on the China pie chart we will go down to the city level based on the navigation defined in the field well:

And you can use the zooming capabilities of the map as well.

Pretty cool and you can do more with the map with the layout settings in the Ribbon:

In addition to hierarchy, drill up & down, and cool map capabilities there is another minor addition that was added and that was support for hyperlinks in a text box.

In this example I have a text box that includes the words ‘Microsoft BI’ and below that a hyperlink to the web site.  If I hold the CTRL key and click on the hyperlink it goes to the web site:

They hyperlink simply gets added after you type in the URL and press a space, hit enter, or click out of the text box.

Well that covers the majority of the new enhancements to Power View, for the complete list checkout the links at the bottom of my previous posting – Power View meet Microsoft Excel 2013.

I will continue to work with the new features and post any additional findings I might come across like using images from the data models and the issues you might encounter along with using these files in SharePoint.

Power View meet Microsoft Excel 2013

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This week Microsoft released the Public Review of Office 2013 (aka Office 15).  You can download and check this out now for yourself and read some reviews of the new changes here:

• Sign up and check it out, was just released on Mon, July 16 – http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview
• Find out additional information here on some of the new features – http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/16/microsoft-office-15-preview/

One of the items that I have been patiently waiting to talk about and demonstrate is the new Power View and not only the new enhancements to it, but that it also is available in Excel 2013!  With Excel 2013 the PowerPivot and Power View COM add-ins are provided with the installation, you simply need to enable them in the Options->Add-Ins section.

Before I dive into the new Power View let me show a quick screenshot of one of the Power View reports from our Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View book.

A couple of things I want you to take a look at primarily is the field list.  Also you will be able to compare this look to the enhanced one that I will now show off in Excel 2013.  To create my Excel 2013 I decided I would go against a complete Excel solution, so I created a complete Pan-Geo Hospitality & Travel PowerPivot Model.  I did this first in Excel 2010 and then upgraded this in Excel 2013 by accessing the Model in the PowerPivot Ribbon in Excel 2013 (you will notice that in this screenshot you will see two PowerPivot tabs and that is because I have both versions of Office running along with the add-ins (PowerPivot for Excel from SQL 2012 and now the one for Microsoft Office PowerPivot for Excel 2013).

When I opened up my Excel 2010 file with the PowerPivot model in Excel 2013 (which I also enabled the PowerPivot add-in) I then went to the 2nd PowerPivot tab in the Ribbon and clicked the Manage button in the Data Model section.

Could really use a line break in this warning message box:)

So just to reiterate the situation and give you an option to cancel.

Time to reboot:)

WARNING: I did notice one issue with the upgrade, the KPI that I had defined in my Excel 2010 PowerPivot model did not convert over, so I had to create the measure from scratch and setup the KPI again

Once I had the model converted over I used the new option in the Insert tab of the Ribbon for Power View (right in the middle in the Reports section)!

If you click on this and you do not have the add-in enabled you will be prompted and you can enable it then.

This creates a new worksheet in the workbook and then you can start building out your report, just like you can do with the current version of Power View, but this time you are doing it in Excel and not in your web browser as part of the Reporting Services 2012 integration with SharePoint 2010.

Here is what I ended up with recreating the Hotel Performance Dashboard report displayed above (notice if you can see a few extra items I have added and any other differences):

Did you see anything new on the report?  No, not the fact that I changed the Play Axis in the scatter chart or the data labels being added in the bar chart.  Look closer….okay, so you did see it, there are images included in the report and they are not part of the model definition!

The first one that I will point out is in the top left hand portion of the report and the new option I used here is the Picture option in the Insert section.

You can include Image files now so you can include the company logo as a report header (jpg, jpeg, and png files).

The other image you see is in the background of the report and for this I used the Set Image option in the Background Image section.

Here you can select the same type of image files as the picture and then you can specify the position option as Fit, Stretch, Tile, or Center. Along with that you can specify the transparency level and here I have it set to 90%.

Pretty neat, right?

Well you can do more formatting.  If you recall in the existing Power View we have Styles – Using Styles in Microsoft Power View.  In the new version here we can really tweak the report setup using the Themes section.

I can change the Font from Segoe UI to Times New Roman. I can select a different Theme, adjust the Font Size, and alter the Background (these changes are all at the report level, not item).  The result (not saying this is ideal) ends up looking like the following:

Another interesting item you can do here in Power View is in the Data section of the Ribbon.  You can actually review and modify relationships.

Pretty slick.

Let’s quick go back to the second screenshot above and take a look at the Field List.  Notice something different here?  What are those Globes and Spotlights doing in the list?  Yep, you guessed it, Power View now provides geo-coding capabilities to use with the new Map visualization, plus it also supports Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)!  In addition to the new Map visualization, the Pie chart has also been made available.

You can even include Pie charts in Maps (just a bit of a warning here, currently the Pie charts do not support data labels, similar to PerformancePoint Analytical Chart reports).

The mapping capability uses Bing Maps just like SSRS does for some of its mapping that was introduced in SQL Server 2008 R2.

Here is an example of a Map (including Pie charts, just to put it over the top):

You can see in the Field Well that there are new spots for Locations, Longitude, and Latitude.

If you are looking for the Card visualization it is now under the Table.

Now what about those KPIs, how do those look?

Well, looks like we still need some work here, but it is a start.  The indicators it is using are not correct.  I would like to see a more condensed view and options here to provide the detail information about the KPIs, but at least we can include them now.

Now there are more new items and capabilities that I haven’t even touched on yet, so stay tune for another post next week.

For more information about the new BI features in Office 2013 check out the following links:

• Excel 2013: Complete and powerful self-service BI tool
• Learn More about PowerPivot in Excel 2013 Preview
• Learn More about Power View in Excel 2013 Preview

Enjoy and kudos to all of the Microsoft teams that were involved to make all of this happen!

If you liked this post, check out the 2nd part here – Power View Meet Microsoft Excel 2013 Part 2

Now Available: Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View

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I am very excited and proud to announce that there is a brand new book available on the market and now in print – Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View.  When I got home after work yesterday there was a box waiting for me and the books were inside.  It is hard to believe that just over a year and a half ago that I received the email from Brian Larson asking – “Ever want to be an author?”

Here is the outline for the book:

Part I – Power View

• Chapter 1 – Getting Started
• Chapter 2 – The Table Visualization
• Chapter 3 – Additional Visualizations
• Chapter 4 – Charting
• Chapter 5 – Bringing Your Data to Life
• Chapter 6 – Sharing Reports

Part II – Creating a BI Semantic Model (BISM)

• Chapter 7 – BISM: Getting Started
• Chapter 8 – Basic BI Semantic Model Design
• Chapter 9 – BI Semantic Model: Additional Model Features
• Chapter 10 – Using DAX Expressions
• Chapter 11 – Deploying Tabular BI Semantic Models

Part III – Appendixes

• Appendix A – Installing and Configuring the Sample Data
• Appendix B – Creating a Virtual Learning Environment

The book is loaded with Learn By Doing exercises throughout the book and included with the book is a DVD that includes the sample data, project files, Power View reports, and videos of all of the exercises.

There will be eBook versions made available as well and there is even talks of an enhanced one that would be available in the iTunes Apple Store that would have the videos embedded throughout the chapters for viewing.

So what are you waiting for, check it out now and let us know what you think – Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View.

Here is an example of one of the videos for a Learn By Doing exercise:

Microsoft BI VHD XII – SQL 2012

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Update 5/25/2012: Just had someone reach out to me today in regards to a file size issue with the extract.  They were stating that it required 6PB instead of 60GB of space.  When doing the extract they were using the built-in extracting within Windows 7.  I had used WinRAR without any issues.  They downloaded that tool and successfully extracted the files.  Just wanted to make mention of this in case anyone else runs into an issue like this.

After I heard that the new version of the Microsoft Business Intelligence VHD was available I downloaded it to check it out.  The major change was that it now had the RTM release of SQL Server 2012 all setup on it.  You can check out the new demo solution in the catalog here http://mssalesdemos.com and you can download it from here http://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/pd/BIVHD/enus/.

You can download the VHD Hyper-V image, the zip file is 21.6GB and when you extract out the contents you will need approximately 58GB of space (and you will also want some free space as well because the image is setup to grow out to 250GB if needed).  The recommended memory to run this is 8GB, but unfortunately I don’t have that available, so I tested it out with only around 4.5GB of RAM and devoted 2 processors to try and run it with VirtualBox.

The password for the image is the typical pass@word1 for the contoso\Administrator user.  The name of the server is SQLIMAGE2012.

Now since I am using VirtualBox I disabled all of the Hyper-V services along with some additional ones that are not needed to save on some RAM like Remote Desktop services and Windows Defender.  I then took a look at the SQL Services setup and … grrrr … noticed that there are just a few, like three instances.  By this I mean there are three instances of the DB engine (which are definitely not needed), none of the SQL Agent services are running, all three of the SSAS services are running which is good, and they also have two instances of SSRS running (no idea why, similar to the DB engine setup).

So here is the breakdown on the three DB engine instances, the default is for all of the sample databases for the demos along with the MDS database:

The multidimensional instance is where the DQS databases reside:

And the PowerPivot instance is where the SharePoint databases reside:

Wow, let’s see how they are doing on memory with all three of them running:

If you are not going to be doing any DQS you can safely shutdown the Multidimensional instance until you are ready to do so (free up a little more memory).  In looking at the database names I don’t see the SSISDB catalog, so I guess there are probably no demos of any Integration Services.

So along with this I also have to watch out for the other SQL services like Analysis Services (SSAS) that needs a bit of memory:

The top one is the Multidimensional instance, the second one is the PowerPivot, and the third instance (the default) is Tabular SSAS.  So the majority of the data and memory consumption is happening in the PowerPivot and Tabular databases which makes since with the xVelocity in-memory database technology at work here.

Then don’t forget about the two Native instances of SSRS running:

Probably don’t need either of these running and by looking at the database names I only see the databases setup for the new SharePoint Integrated mode setup as the Shared Service Application.  So you could safely shut both of these down for the time being as well.

Well how about we take a look at the SharePoint setup and some of the demos.  In attempting to go to the SQL Image 2012 home page (http://intranet.contoso.com/SitePages/Home.aspx) I got that the page could not be displayed.  So I went to the localhost or server name page instead and it worked just fine (http://sqlimage2012/SitePages/Home.aspx).  Without troubleshooting this further I went with the server name setup and had to modify my connection and URL references for the Power View reports.

We can see a few minor typos with the Power View name not including the space.  The scripts for each of the demos is provided in the Shared Documents library:

All of the images that will be used for the demos have been setup on a separate website instead of being stored in SharePoint:

Here are the examples of the Power View reports:

And there is a nice home page setup for the Contoso Telco company as well (this uses the Multidimensional instance of SSAS, so if you shut that down you will need to start it back up).  You might need to refresh it a few times to get the site and data warmed up a bit so that everything gets displayed:

Well that is the quick overview of the new XII image.  There is plenty more and I will keep exploring and leave some for you to check out as well, enjoy!

Minnesota Microsoft BI User Group 2012 Q2 Meeting–June 5

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The next MN Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group has been scheduled and the agenda is set. This meeting we will have two sessions starting out with an adventure into MDX with the Star Trek experience and then a presentation about agile business intelligence with SQL Server 2012. Just a reminder that the location for this event has now moved to the Microsoft Technology Center location in Edina.
 
MN Microsoft BI User Group 2012 Q2 Meeting

Sponsored by:

Date: Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Check In: 2:30 PM Event Time: 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Location: Microsoft Technology Center – 3601 76th St W, Suite 600 Edina MN 55435 (in LOW 1, 2, and 3)
 
To join via Live Meeting: Click Here

Please Register Now

Agenda:

• 2:30-3:00 : Registration
• 3:00-3:15 : Microsoft BI User Group Updates & Announcements
• 3:15-4:30 : MDX Trek: First Contact
• 4:30-4:45 : Break
• 4:45-5:30 : Agile BI with SQL Server 2012
• 5:30-6:00 : Social and Networking

Presentations:

MDX Trek: First Contact (by Mark Vaillancourt, Digineer) – Cube space; the final frontier. In this Star Trek themed introduction to MDX, we will discuss the fundamentals of cube structure and vocabulary, including tuples, members, sets, hierarchies, and more. We will introduce and demonstrate the basic syntax of MDX with queries that include navigating hierarchies and even some time-based expressions. This session will give you the tools you need to write simple, yet meaningful, MDX queries in your own environment.

Agile BI with SQL Server 2012 (by Neelesh Raheja, GNet Group and Terry McDonald, Pentair) – There is always pressure from business users to deliver flexible, fast, self-service and cost effective BI/Data Warehouse solutions. Going into a BI project, we expect that business requirements will evolve and change; one business question will lead to another, creating challenges in managing scope, iterations, timelines and costs. With a traditional waterfall BI project execution approach it can take several months to incorporate new functionality in a data warehouse and update reports, creating a backlog and falling short of users’ expectations.

In this session we will show how agile BI project execution can be implemented using Microsoft SQL Server 2012. We will explore how PowerPivot and Analysis Services 2012 enable additional flexibility; accelerating the time it takes to deliver value with BI projects. Agile techniques along with self-service tools offer an opportunity to transform traditional BI project development methods to fit dynamic user requirements and accelerate development, testing and deployment. We will also present a strategy, process and key considerations for using Agile techniques to promote ad-hoc self service reports to a corporate BI solution.

 
Please Register Now

Hope to see you there!

New book: Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View

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There is a brand new book coming to a bookstore near you – Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View. 

I am very proud to announce that I am one of the co-authors along with Brian Larson, Mark Davis, and Paul Purington.  We are all from Superior Consulting Services🙂

This book is dedicated to the new self-service report authoring tool Power View that is provided in SharePoint 2010 as part of the new SQL Server Reporting Services 2012 integration. 

The book is split into two parts, the first focusing on Power View and the second on Tabular BI Semantic Model development, DAX, deployment, and management.

Included with the book is a DVD that will provide our sample data, supporting files, Power View report samples, Tabular model project files, and over 50 video demonstrations!

The book will be available in June in time for North America TechEd.  We are currently on the home stretch of the book doing our final reviews and we are very excited to see all of our hard work come together.

I want to thank Brian Larson and McGraw-Hill Publishing for getting this put together, including me, and making this possible.