Power BI in SharePoint Online

I am very excited after Microsoft released Power BI GA (general availability) at the end of July. It comes with list of impressive new features which is explained in detail in this MSDN article.
I want my blog readers to know what is Power BI and how it can be used with SharePoint Online to leverage the BI capabilities of SharePoint. Let's learn the basics in this article.
Articles in SharePoint Business Intelligence (BI) Series:

Power BI in SharePoint Online
Creating reports using OData Feed in Power BI
Power View report in SharePoint
Display Power BI reports in SharePoint Online

Microsoft came with a new tool for BI for the following reasons:

1. Use the known tool  - Excel
2. Discover More  - Power Query
3. Analyze More – Power Pivot
4. Visualize  - Power View / Power Map
5. Combine with Office 365 – share with any one
6. Power BI sites – collaborate and share the data sets with your team
7. Dive into Q & A – ask a question and get answers visually
8. Stay Connected – Mobile Apps
9. Schedule data refresh and create security settings easily

So what is Power BI?

1. Cloud based service works with excel to provide users a complete self-service BI solution
2. Available in SharePoint & Excel 2013 Online (available only in E3 / E4 subscription)
3. With Power BI, you can easily deploy a cloud based BI environment for users to share insights, collaborate and access reports from anywhere on any device
4. With Power BI for Office 365, you can easily setup an online gallery for users to share insights
5. Mobile apps available in Apple store, Windows store & Google play store

How does Power BI differ from SharePoint BI?
 

Feature	Power BI	SharePoint BI
Content Viewing	It displays all document libraries with a preview to reports / dashboards	It displays only pivot gallery document library
Natural Language	Q & A provides the end user to search for data with your questions and it displays the results in visualization	No such option available
Workbook as a data source	Power BI the data model and the reports (created with Excel pivot tables + charts, or Power View for Excel) everything must be contained within a single .xlsx file	In SharePoint, we can upload a Power Pivot model to the Power Pivot Gallery and other reports can connect to it using a URL-based connection string. This works for Power View for SharePoint, Reporting Services, PerformancePoint, and Excel
Data Refresh Option	It is simpler for end users to manage the data refresh	Lot of options available for data refresh and it’s controlled by Admin
Data Management Gateway	It is a hybrid environment (partially cloud based and partially on premises)	No data management gateway available
Data rendering option	HTML 5 (hence cross platform support)	Silverlight for data preview
Maximum workbook size	Max is 250MB	2 GB
Security	Sign in with Organization ID (O365 ID)	AD security mechanism
Enterprise Search for data	Search query is the important feature and it can search public and data within organization	N/A
Mobile Application	Available in Microsoft, Apple and Google Play store	N/A

            
Where can I download the Power BI and related products?

1. Sign up for Power BI
2. Power BI for desktop
3. Power BI Analysis Services Connector
4. Power BI Business Gateway
5. Power BI Apps for mobile (apps for Apple, Microsoft and Android mobile)
6. Power BI pricing

Hope this article, gives an idea of Power BI and how it differs from SharePoint BI. I will explain about connecting data from different data sources, creating dashboards, reports, etc. with Power BI in the coming articles.
Hope this helps you! Please share you comments since it helps me write more. Also, share this post to your friends via the networks below.  

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Power Query and Power Map in Excel 2013

As you all know, Microsoft is improving the BI capabilities with a lot of new features with exciting releases in the year 2015. Microsoft has introduced new add-ins called Power Query and Power Map for Excel 2013.
Believe me guys, this is really awesome add-ins which taken the Microsoft's BI capabilities one step ahead of all other BI competitors!
Let's try to create a power map by searching a public data using power query in Excel 2013 in this article.
Before trying a sample, let's understand what is power query and power map for excel 2013 and it's download links:
Power Query:

• Microsoft Power Query for Excel (a data analysis tool) is an Excel add-in that enhances the self-service Business Intelligence experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery, combine, refine, access and collaborate.
• Power Query supports importing data from a wide range of Web sources, including scrapping tables from HTML pages, as well as importing data from Web APIs. Power Query supports XML, JSON and OData formats
• It includes intuitive discovery features, a powerful query language, and a built-in ability to share your discoveries with others

Power Map:

• Power Map provides interactive, 3D visualization with geospatial and temporal data
• It enables information workers to discover and share new insights from data through
• rich, 3D visualization on a globe with fluidic appearance & guided cinematic tours
• seeing time-stamped data change over time (which you might not have seen in traditional 2D tables and charts) and to share it with others
• you can create a video tour easily in a single click
• Geo flow is another feature which shows how the
• data changed over a period of time

Excel Add-in Links:

1. Power Query for Excel 2013
2. Power Map for Excel 2013

Creating a Power Map with GeoFlow:
Let's add a public data from internet by using Power Query - connecting data from the existing excel file.
I have downloaded the U.S. Operable Generating Units in the United States by State and Energy Source, 2011 from the link. Thank you for the data!
Open the excel 2013 -> Power Query tab -> Get External Data -> From Excel

This will open the query editor where you can select the data sets (this downloaded excel sheet has various tabs with different power sources). You can combine the data using Power Query data editor as well.
Let's select only "Coal" worksheet, delete the unwanted columns and create a date column using initial month and year (which is required for showing the growth of coal energy plants across U.S by county in power map) as shown below:

Now, click Insert Map -> Power Map option in the excel file -> Power Map will load the data source and it should automatically detect the geo-location fields from the dataset.

I have created two types of visualizations, one which is heat map visualization which will show the coal power generated in U.S. by state as shown below:

 The other one is coal power generated in U.S. by county with a time by using Initial Month of Operation column as shown below:

    

Power Map gives the options of creating video tour in a single click from the menu. Here is the video, I created from this sample:

Cool, isn't it?
Thanks for reading! Don't forgot to share this post and post your valuable comments which will make me write more. 

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