Guide to the latest version of Microsoft Power BI as a stand alone data visualisation tool.

1. The C-Level’s Guide
to the New

2. The C-Level’s Guide to the New Power BI
• WHAT IS POWER BI?
o How does the 2015 Power BI release compare to the
previous version?
o What’s the difference between Power BI and Power
BI Pro, and what do they cost?
o Power BI Personal Gateway
o Power BI Analysis Services Connector
o Power BI apps
• HOW DOES POWER BI STACK UP AGAINST
THE COMPETITION?
• HOW DOES POWER BI FIT WITHIN A BROAD-
ER BI STRATEGY?
• RESOURCES

3. The C-Level’s Guide to the New
Power BI is a stand-alone solution for business intelligence that collects and
translates your company’s data visually using live dashboards. Your own personal
dashboard will reflect data that most interests you using compelling visuals: maps,
gauges, treemaps, bubble charts, funnel diagrams and more; if you want to go deeper,
you can drill down into any of the reports for more in-depth understanding of trends,
opportunities and issues. The dashboard is a live document linked to your own data
sources, so information is fresh and pertinent.
The July 2015 release of Power BI’s most recent version marks the latest development
in two important and ongoing trends in business intelligence. The first is the move
toward a true self-service product, which means whether you’re an analyst, a CIO, or a
marketer you’ll be able to pull up the metrics you need on your own, without having to
involve a BI expert or someone from IT (assuming the data channels have been
established properly to begin with). The second is the growing reach of Big Data,
which involves the collection and processing of massive amounts of information. Big
Data analyses are often performed on information from disparate sources, originally
recorded for a variety of purposes that don’t necessarily have anything to do with
providing business insights. Power BI lets you compare your business’s own internal
data with data from any number of external sources.
With Big Data, you could, for instance, investigate
trends in search engine queries to get a sense of
what products people are interested in. Or you can
compare stock performances for various industries
over a given period of time. But of course you’ll also
want to understand how your own business is
operating in as fine a detail as possible. The idea is
that you’ll be able to apply the insights that emerge
from these analyses to your plans for where to take
your business in the future.
Power BI allows great freedom in tailoring analyses and visuals to answer whatever
questions most need answering, in whatever way is the easiest for report readers to
grasp. You can even simply type in a question in natural language and get an answer
in graph form.
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WHAT IS POWER BI?

4. The C-Level’s Guide to the New
The new Power BI, also called Power BI Dashboards, is a stand-alone platform
accessible at PowerBI.com (no longer a part of Office 365). It is also available through
Microsoft Excel, through which you can access a suite of tools that were previously
associated with the original Power BI: Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, and
Power Map.
If you go to the new Power BI homepage, you’ll see there’s no mention of any of these
Power tools. Instead, they have it broken down into steps: getting your data, crafting
data stories, and collecting and sharing it. And, instead of talking about analysis and
visualization, they’re now talking about asking questions and exploring the
implications (though analysis and visualization are obviously still the main functions).
Said James Phillips, the general manager of "data experiences" at Microsoft, “The
difference from previous generations of BI isn't just the tools – it's the idea of what
data you can get intelligence from, and how much of a technical expert you have to
be. It’s the move to finally allow business users to adopt BI without being technical
professionals.”
The new Power BI marries easy access to data with user simplicity. It is compatible
with a host of data sources like QuickBooks, Marketo, Zendesk, Github, Salesforce,
Twilio, Google Analytics and others, and can retrieve an answer to your natural
language question from these sources.
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How does the 2015 Power BI release compare to
the previous version?

5. The C-Level’s Guide to the New
Power BI is a free download with a data capacity of 1GB/user and 10,000 rows of data
streamed per hour. It features interactive dashboards for creating, viewing and
sharing reports and insights, as well as Power BI Desktop for authoring additional
custom content. You can explore data imported from Excel, CSV and Power BI Desktop
files with natural language queries (currently limited to English). Content is refreshed
daily.
For $9.99/user/month, you can upgrade these services with Power BI Pro, which offers
data capacity of 10GB/user and one million rows of data per hour. Upgrades include
hourly data refreshes, interactivity with other live data sources, and a host of
collaborative and data sharing tools.
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What’s the difference between Power BI and Power BI Pro,
and what do they cost?

6. The C-Level’s Guide to the New
The Power BI Personal Gateway is only available with Power BI Pro. It is a service that
keeps your dashboards populated with the most up-to-date data from your
on-premises sources, without requiring manual refreshes. You only need to download
the gateway if you are getting data from on-prem sources. What Personal Gateway
does is securely connect your internal data to the Power BI services, so you can apply
the same visualization and querying tools to information stored in your business’s
own repositories as you can to data stored online. Basically, whenever the reports are
refreshed, Personal Gateway checks the account’s permissions to make sure it has
access to the data source. It then pulls in the data for analysis or presentation in
dashboards or reports.
PG. 6
Power BI Personal Gateway

7. The C-Level’s Guide to the New
The Analysis Services Connector makes the connection between your Power BI users
and your on-premises analysis services secure and quick. That connector comes into
play when a Power BI user interacts with a report in Power BI, such as clicking on a
chart; that’s when a Data Analysis Expression (DAX) is created by Power BI and fired
off, via the Analysis Services Connector, to your company’s Analysis Services server.
You can connect to on-premises data in SQL Server Analysis Services without moving
your data to the cloud and schedule the data in your reports to refresh from
on-premises data sources.
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Power BI Analysis Services Connector

8. The C-Level’s Guide to the New
You’ll have access to your data anywhere when you download the free Power BI app
for Windows, iOS and Android. This native app gives you live, interactive access to your
data from your mobile device while you’re traveling… or even when you’re just out on
the links!
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Power BI Mobile Apps

9. The C-Level’s Guide to the New
Power BI was previewed for about six months before its general release in July 2015.
Reviews of the new Power BI are just beginning to come in, with favorable comments
on its ease of use but concerns about speed and glitchiness. Tableau continues to be
the standard against which all other BI tools are compared, and Power BI still aspires
to Tableau’s intuitive qualities.
A June 2015 review on InfoWorld states, “Overall, Power BI is a promising preview of a
self-service business intelligence system. While Microsoft is starting to get the idea
that not everyone wants to use Excel for analysis, Power BI currently relies on Excel or
the Excel-like Power BI Designer application for data conditioning and joins between
data sources. This is acceptable for the price, but not as convenient as Tableau.
Similarly, Power BI usually does a reasonable job of setting the axes on visualizations
and setting the sizes of bubbles (in bubble charts), but doesn’t let you refine the
appearance of the visualization. Again, this is acceptable for the price, but not as
convenient as Tableau.”
Says a review from Butler Analytics: “Tableau…is well
regarded for its ease of use and productivity, and is a
mature product – which the new Power BI Designer is
not. Tableau satisfies individuals and workgroups with
its desktop and server based products – but at the end
of the day it serves one function very well – business
users, with little training, can get to their data and
create visualizations easily and painlessly. The same
cannot be said of the Excel based tools, which do
require considerable skills to use and are less
productive for simple tasks. But the new Power BI
Designer changes all this. Clicking, drag-and-drop and
easy data manipulation make it a direct competitor for
Tableau, although at the moment it certainly is not as powerful – but six months from
now the story might be different.”
Microsoft’s Phillips notes, "The second-generation [of Power BI] is the move to
self-service BI; that's where you've got Excel, you've got Tableau – you've got solutions
a business analyst can pick up and use. You may not know OLAP, or be able to install a
database, but you can get value out of it and create analytical reports."
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HOW DOES POWER BI STACK UP AGAINST THE COMPETITION?

10. The C-Level’s Guide to the New
Power BI is seductive. Once you get your hands on the controls, it’s easy to start to feel
like you have an entire world of data at your fingertips and that it’s all yours to sift
through for insights relevant to your business decisions. But, as you’re plugging in to
diverse data sources, structuring tables and relationships, building models, drawing
up graphs, and creating dynamic presentations, you need to keep in mind two crucial
questions:
• How reliable is this data?
• What does the data mean in the context of our business goals?
You could do an analysis of Facebook comments, for instance, and come away
thinking people have a generally favorable view of your product. But then you have to
ask how “favorable” is being defined. And you also have to ask if Facebook
commenters are representative of your target customers. If they are, you still have to
ask how you can use this information about their favorable views to make further
progress toward your goals.
So you do have to subtract a bit of the marketing hype from the videos and other
materials you come across when researching Power BI. In and of itself, Power BI really
can’t stand in place of a comprehensive business intelligence strategy. Power BI is a
spectacular tool set for collating, modeling, and visualizing data—but you need to have
a reliable process in place for recording meaningful data in the first place. One of the
best things about Power BI is that it allows you to pull in information from a wider
array of sources than ever before, but not all information is gathered using the same
methods, definitions, samples, etc. So the farther afield you go to get your data, the
more provisional you should consider any conclusions derived from it. And most of
the information you’ll be relying on will be internal to your organization. This means
you have to have a way to generate the data before you can use any tools, however
powerful, to analyze it. And you need a way to make sure the data is clean and not
duplicated, unusable, or contaminated with extraneous or unreadable bits of
information. (Raw data can be dangerous.)
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HOW DOES POWER BI FIT WITHIN A BROADER BI STRATEGY?

11. The C-Level’s Guide to the New
A more holistic view of business intelligence follows steps such as:
• Setting business goals
• Identifying key performance indicators relating to those goals
• Establishing procedures and putting in place mechanisms for recording and
storing data on those indicators
• Creating regular processes for collecting, reporting, and sharing this data (This is
the step where Power BI is most helpful)
• Scheduling meetings of decision-makers to discuss the reports, interpret them in
the context of your business goals, and determine the implications for the
broader business strategy
Bottom line: Power BI is a great tool—as is Tableau—but it’s only a single part of
a comprehensive BI solution.
PG. 11
HOW DOES POWER BI FIT WITHIN A BROADER BI STRATEGY?

12. The C-Level’s Guide to the New
“Microsoft Power BI is no Tableau (yet),” by Martin Heller at InfoWorld
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2929027/data-visualization/review-microsoft-power-bi-is-no-t
ableau-yet.html?nsdr=true
“Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau,” by Butler Analytics
http://butleranalytics.com/microsoft-power-bi-vs-tableau/
“Microsoft's new Power BI: a very different way of doing business intelligence,”
by Mary Branscombe at Tech Radar Pro
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/world-of-tech/microsoft-s-new-power-bi-a-very-different-wa
y-of-doing-business-intelligence-1282485
“The New Power BI Personal Gateway – Do I Need It?” by John White at
The White Pages
http://whitepages.unlimitedviz.com/2015/07/power-bi-personal-gateway/
“Microsoft Says Power BI Will Come Out Of Preview On July 24, Open Sources
Visualization Stack,” by Frederic Lardinois at Tech Crunch
http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/10/microsoft-takes-power-bi-out-of-preview-open-sources-powe
r-bi-visualization-stack/
Microsoft’s Power BI
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/
Microsoft’s Power BI Pricing
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/pricing
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RESOURCES

13. The C-Level’s Guide to the New
ABOUT APTERA
With offices in Fort Wayne, IN, and Nashville, TN, Aptera is home
to one of the most talented software and web design teams in
the country. Since its founding in 2003, the Aptera team has
grown from a two-man operation to an organization with over
seventy employees serving businesses all over the country. A
Microsoft Gold Certified Managed Partner, Aptera’s team has
experts in SharePoint, Business Intelligence, .NET Development,
Cloud Computing, Microsoft Lync, and more. We’re equipped to
step in at any stage of your business’s project, from analyzing
workflows and installing data-tracking modules to building
custom software or a new web site, and from optimizing your
search rankings to moving you into the cloud. We believe the key
to our success has been hiring excellent people, giving them the
resources they need, and encouraging them to treat every
project as the basis for a lasting partnership.
To get more information about Power BI follow Aptera on these
social networks
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