Tag Archives: Power BI

Setting up Power BI Excel features

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This is the second post in the Power BI category. In this post I explain how to setup Excel environment to user Power BI Excel components. Power BI offers 4 individual Add-ins for Excel.

They are Power Pivot, Power View, Power Query and Power Map

Power View and Power Pivot are available in the Office Professional Plus and Office 365 Professional Plus editions, and in the standalone edition of Excel 2013  You do not need to perform a separate installation you just have to activate them. But you have to download the Power Map and Power Query.

Power Query Download Link : http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/redir/XT104104542.aspx

Power Map Download Link : http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/redir/XT104048049.aspx

Once installed you should activate they aren’t activated by default. To activate the Add-ins (all the above Add-ins are COM Add-ins) click File and then Options; select the Add-Ins tab and select COM Add-Ins in the drop down.

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Click Go and you will get the list of available COM Add-ins. Select the above 4 Add-ins and activate them. Power Query and Power Pivot reside in their own tab while Power Map and Power View are available under the Insert tab. If you do not have Silverlight installed in your machine you should install Silverlight in order to make the Power View work.

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Now your Excel environment is enriched with the Power BI Excel features.

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What is Power BI

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Last week I delivered an introductory presentation about Power BI covering all the features of it in the SQL Server Universe user group meeting. I got a fair amount of time to showcase the features of Power BI to the audience.

I concluded my presentation giving the following definition to Power BI from Microsoft’s point of view or what Microsoft has been trying to do.

 

Productizing self service BI tools and services coupled with the company’s cloud based organizational strategy

Personally I think Microsoft is determined to have a product in the self service BI market, they’ve been trying to bring all the tools and services under one umbrella named Power BI.

It works perfectly well, it’s a very impressive product to deliver a showcase. I have delivered product introductory presentations for Azure and Windows 8 in other user group meetings. Compared to them Power BI is a small product which draws the interest of few people, but it didn’t fail to impress the audience, so thought of writing about Power BI.

Power BI has components categorized under 3 topics.

Excel Features

  • Power Query
  • Power Pivot
  • Power View
  • Power Map

Power BI for Office 365

  • Power BI Sites
  • Power BI Q&A
  • Query and Data Management
  • Power BI Windows App

IT Infrastructure service for Power BI

  • Provision Power BI for Office 365
  • Power BI Admin Center
  • Data Management Gateway

Excel features are available for download for free. You can download them from this URL

Detailed blog posts about each component will follow in the coming days.