The Future is Bright – The Future is “Power BI”
For a number of years I have been using Excel & Excel VBA to deliver tactical solutions to the “Public” & “Private” sectors. Increasingly I have been involved in delivering Management Information (“MI”) solutions via the extraction of data from various data repositories – mainly structured databases including MS Access, SQL and Oracle to name a few.
The provision of accurate and timely “MI” is Key to a business’s success and much of my work in this area has been in solving:-
- The technical challenges of connecting to different data repositories
- The technical challenges of selecting and extracting the appropriate data
- The challenges of manipulating the data and creating “Dashboards” to deliver on the reporting requirements
Times and technologies change and the importance of delivering “MI” has been mostly superseded by the requirement to deliver Business Intelligence (“BI”) solutions where data can be selected, “Sliced” and “Diced” and “Mashed” in such a way that any trends within the data can be recognised and reported using “New Generation Dashboards” that are interactive and allow the user to ask questions of the data and get information and visualisations directly.
Large Enterprises are on-board this new world and a number of bespoke products are available to meet their needs – at a cost.
So what relevance is my career with Excel, Excel VBA to this scenario?
On my “Excel” journey I have met with Power Pivot, Power Query and “DAX” formulae tools to help me deliver to clients and reduce the work involved in challenges 1 and 2. These tools are very powerful and are delivered free with Excel (or as Excel Add-Ins) - Excel version 2010 onwards; with these tools the user is freed from many of the constraints of “getting” the data and can concentrate on the delivery of information to their business.
This is where “Power BI” raises its head - it commoditises the collection of data and delivers in one product:-
- All the powerful features of Power Pivot
- All the powerful features of Power Query
- All the powerful features of the “DAX” engine
- Powerful visualisation options
- Interactive and self-service “BI” options
Oh – It is Free!!! (Enterprise “Cloud” based options are available at a cost)
Once small to medium enterprises understand this, I believe that there will be work for contractors to assist with their journey - so I am doing all I can to learn, use and work with this product.
The Future is Bright – The Future is “Power BI” - WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
Ted, I have been doing a Big Data and Data Visualisation course at TU Delft and we have been taught to use Python for data handling tasks, much easier than VB. MS Power BI is excellent, especially in conjunction with Office365 E3 & E5.