Master the art of loading external data into Excel for use in reporting, charting, dashboarding, and business intelligence. This book provides a complete and thorough explanation of Microsoft Excel's Get and Transform feature set, showing you how to connect to a range of external databases and other data sources to find data and pull that data into your local spreadsheet for further analysis. Leading databases are covered, including Microsoft Azure data sources and web sources, and you will learn how to access those sources from your Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Getting data into Excel is a prerequisite for using Excel's analytics capabilities. This book takes you beyond copying and pasting by showing you how to connect to your corporate databases that are hosted in the Azure cloud, and how to pull data from Oracle Database and SQL Server, and other sources. Accessing data is only half the problem, and the other half involves cleansing and rearranging your data to make it useful in spreadsheet form. Author Adam Aspin shows you how to create datasets and transformations. For advanced problems, there is help on the M language that is built into Excel, specifically to support mashing up data in support of business intelligence and analysis. If you are an Excel user, you won't want to be without this book that teaches you to extract and prepare external data ready for use in what is arguably the world's leading analytics tool. What You Will Learn Connect to a range of external data, from databases to Azure sources Ingest data directly into your spreadsheets, or into PowerPivot data models Cleanse and prepare external data so it can be used inside Excel Refresh data quickly and easily to always have the latest information Transform data into ready-to-use structures that fit the spreadsheet format Execute M language functions for complex data transformations Who This Book Is For Excel users who want to access data from external sources-including the Microsoft Azure platform-in order to create business intelligence reporting, dashboards, and visualizations. For Excel users needing to cleanse and rearrange such data to meet their own, specific needs.

Deliver eye-catching and insightful business intelligence with Microsoft Power BI Desktop. This new edition has been updated to cover all the latest features of Microsoft's continually evolving visualization product. New in this edition is help with storytelling-adapted to PCs, tablets, and smartphones-and the building of a data narrative. You will find coverage of templates and JSON style sheets, data model annotations, and the use of composite data sources. Also provided is an introduction to incorporating Python visuals and the much awaited Decomposition Tree visual. Pro Power BI Desktop shows you how to use source data to produce stunning dashboards and compelling reports that you mold into a data narrative to seize your audience's attention. Slice and dice the data with remarkable ease and then add metrics and KPIs to project the insights that create your competitive advantage. Convert raw data into clear, accurate, and interactive information with Microsoft's free self-service BI tool. This book shows you how to choose from a wide range of built-in and third-party visualization types so that your message is always enhanced. You will be able to deliver those results on PCs, tablets, and smartphones, as well as share results via the cloud. The book helps you save time by preparing the underlying data correctly without needing an IT department to prepare it for you. What You Will Learn Deliver attention-grabbing information, turning data into insight Find new insights as you chop and tweak your data as never before Build a data narrative through interactive reports with drill-through and cross-page slicing Mash up data from multiple sources into a cleansed and coherent data model Build interdependent charts, maps, and tables to deliver visually stunning information Create dashboards that help in monitoring key performance indicators of your business Adapt delivery to mobile devices such as phones and tablets Who This Book Is For Power users who are ready to step up to the big leagues by going beyond what Microsoft Excel by itself can offer. The book also is for line-of-business managers who are starved for actionable data needed to make decisions about their business. And the book is for BI analysts looking for an easy-to-use tool to analyze data and share results with C-suite colleagues they support.

Take business intelligence delivery to a new level that is interactive, engaging, even fun, all while driving commercial success through sound decision making. Do this through the power of visualization using this updated edition covering new features and added support for visualization in Excel 2016, and describing the latest developments in Get & Transform and DAX. The example data set has also been updated to demonstrate all that Microsoft's self-service business intelligence suite is now capable of. High Impact Data Visualization in Excel with Power View, 3D Maps, Get & Transform and Power BI, 2nd Edition helps in harnessing the power of Microsoft's flagship, self-service business intelligence suite to deliver compelling and interactive insight with remarkable ease. Learn the essential techniques needed to enhance the look and feel of reports and dashboards so that you can seize your audience's attention and provide them with clear and accurate information. Also learn to integrate data from a variety of sources and create coherent data models displaying clear metrics and attributes. Power View is Microsoft's ground-breaking tool for ad-hoc data visualization and analysis. It's designed to produce elegant and visually arresting output. It's also built to enhance user experience through polished interactivity. Power Map is a similarly powerful mechanism for analyzing data across geographic and political units. Get & Transform lets you load, shape and streamline data from multiple sources. Power Pivot can extend and develop data into a dynamic model. Power BI allows you to share your findings with colleagues, and present your insights to clients. High Impact Data Visualization in Excel with Power View, 3D Maps, Get & Transform and Power BI, 2nd Edition helps you master this suite of powerful tools from Microsoft. You'll learn to identify data sources, and to save time by preparing your underlying data correctly. You'll also learn to deliver your powerful visualizations and analyses through the cloud to PCs, tablets and smartphones. Simple techniques take raw data and convert it into information. Slicing and dicing metrics delivers interactive insight. Visually arresting output grabs and focuses attention on key indicators. What You Will Learn Produce designer output that will astound your bosses and peers. Drive business intelligence from Excel using BI in the Cloud. Gather source data from corporate and public sources. Integrate charts, maps, and tables to deliver visually stunning information. Discover new insights as you chop and tweak your data as never before. Adapt delivery to mobile devices. Outshine competing products and enhance existing skills. Who This Book Is For Any Power BI Desktop, Excel or SharePoint user. Business Intelligence developers, power users, IT managers, finance experts, and more can use this book to outshine the competition by producing high-impact business intelligence reporting on a variety of devices from a variety of sources.

Business Intelligence with SQL Server Reporting Services helps you deliver business intelligence with panache. Harness the power of the Reporting Services toolkit to combine charts, gauges, sparklines, indicators, and maps into compelling dashboards and scorecards. Create compelling visualizations that seize your audience's attention and help business users identify and react swiftly to changing business conditions. Best of all, you'll do all these things by creating new value from software that is already installed and paid for - SQL Server and the included SQL Server Reporting Services. Businesses run on numbers, and good business intelligence systems make the critical numbers immediately and conveniently accessible. Business users want access to key performance indicators in the office, at the beach, and while riding the subway home after a day's work. Business Intelligence with SQL Server Reporting Services helps you meet these need for anywhere/anytime access by including chapters specifically showing how to deliver on modern devices such as smart phones and tablets. You'll learn to deliver the same information, with similar look-and-feel, across the entire range of devices used in business today. Key performance indicators give fast notification of business unit performance Polished dashboards deliver essential metrics and strategic comparisons Visually arresting output on multiple devices focuses attention

Use JSON theme files to standardize the look of Power BI dashboards and reports. This book shows how you can create theme files using the Power BI Desktop application to define high-level formatting attributes for dashboards as well as how to tailor detailed formatting specifications for individual dashboard elements in JSON files. Standardize the look of your dashboards and apply formatting consistently over all your reports. The techniques in this book provide you with tight control over the presentation of all aspects of the Power BI dashboards and reports that you create.  Power BI theme files use JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) as their structure, so the book includes a brief introduction to JSON as well as how it applies to Power BI themes. The book further includes a complete reference to all the current formatting definitions and JSON structures that are at your disposal for creating JSON theme files up to the May 2023 release of Power BI Desktop. Finally, the book includes dozens of theme files, from the simple to the most complex, that you can adopt and adapt to suit your own requirements.  What You Will Learn Produce designer output without manually formatting every individual visual in a Power BI dashboard Standardize presentation for families of dashboard types Switch presentation styles in a couple of clicks Save dozens, or hundreds, of hours laboriously formatting dashboards Define enterprise-wide presentation standards Retroactively apply standard styles to existing dashboards   Who This Book Is For Power BI users who want to save time by defining standardized formatting for their dashboards and reports, IT professionals who want to create corporate standards of dashboard presentation, and marketing and communication specialists who want to set organizational standards for dashboard delivery.

Produce high-quality, visually attractive analysis quickly and effectively with Microsoft's key BI tool. This book teaches analysts, managers, power users, and developers how to harness the power of Microsoft's self-service business intelligence flagship product to deliver compelling and interactive insight with remarkable ease. It then shows you the essential techniques needed to go from source data to dashboards that seize your audience's attention and provide them with clear and accurate information. As well as producing elegant and visually arresting output, you learn how to enhance the user experience through adding polished interactivity. This book shows you how to make interactive dashboards that allow you to guide users through the meaning of the data that they are exploring. Drill down features are also covered that allow you and your audience to dig deeper and uncover new insights by exploring anomalous and interesting data points. Reading this book builds your skills around creating meaningful and elegant dashboards using a range of compelling visuals. It shows you how to apply simple techniques to convert data into business insight. The book covers tablet and smartphone layouts for delivering business value in today's highly mobile world. You'll learn about formatting for effect to make your data tell its story, and you'll be a master at creating visually arresting output on multiple devices that grabs attention, builds influence, and drives change. What You Will Learn Produce designer output that will astound your bosses and peers Make new insights as you chop and tweak your data as never before Create high-quality analyses in record time Create interdependent charts, maps, and tables Deliver visually stunning information Drill down through data to provide unique understandings Outshine competing products and enhance existing skills Adapt your dashboard delivery to mobile devices Who This Book Is For For any Power BI user who wants to strengthen their ability to deliver compelling analytics via Microsoft's widely adopted analytics platform. For those new to Power BI who want to learn the full extent of what the platform is capable of. For power users such as BI analysts, data architects, IT managers, accountants, and C-suite members who want to drive change in their organizations.

This book provides all you need to find data from external sources and load and transform that data into Power BI where you can mine it for business insights and a competitive edge. This ranges from connecting to corporate databases such as Azure SQL and SQL Server to file-based data sources, and cloud- and web-based data sources. The book also explains the use of Direct Query and Live Connect to establish instant connections to databases and data warehouses and avoid loading data. The book provides detailed guidance on techniques for transforming inbound data into normalized data sets that are easy to query and analyze. This covers data cleansing, data modification, and standardization as well as merging source data into robust data structures that can feed into your data model. You will learn how to pivot and transpose data and extrapolate missing values as well as harness external programs such as R and Python into a Power Query data flow. You also will see how to handle errors in source data and extend basic data ingestion to create robust and parameterized data load and transformation processes. Everything in this book is aimed at helping you deliver compelling and interactive insight with remarkable ease using Power BI's built-in data load and transformation tools. What You Will Learn Connect Power BI to a range of external data sources Prepare data from external sources for easy analysis in Power BI Cleanse data from duplicates, outliers, and other bad values Make live connections from which to refresh data quickly and easily Apply advanced techniques to interpolate missing data Who This Book Is For All Power BI users from beginners to super users. Any user of the world's leading dashboarding tool can leverage the techniques explained in this book to turbo-charge their data preparation skills and learn how a wide range of external data sources can be harnessed and loaded into Power BI to drive their analytics. No previous knowledge of working with data, databases, or external data sources is required-merely the need to find, transform, and load data into Power BI..

Develop powerful data models that bind data from disparate sources into a coherent whole. Then extend your data models using DAX-the query language that underpins Power BI-to create reusable measures to deliver finely-crafted custom calculations in your dashboards. This book starts off teaching you how to define and enhance the core structures of your data model to make it a true semantic layer that transforms complex data into familiar business terms. You'll learn how to create calculated columns to solve basic analytical challenges. Then you'll move up to mastering DAX measures to finely slice and dice your data. The book also shows how to handle temporal analysis in Power BI using a Date dimension. You will see how DAX Time Intelligence functions can simplify your analysis of data over time. Finally, the book shows how to extend DAX to filter and calculate datasets and develop DAX table functions and variables to handle complex queries. What You Will Learn Create clear and efficient data models that support in-depth analytics Define core attributes such as data types and standardized formatting consistently throughout a data model Define cross-filtering settings to enhance the data model Make use of DAX to create calculated columns and custom tables Extend your data model with custom calculations and reusable measures using DAX Perform time-based analysis using a Date dimension and Time Intelligence functions Who This Book Is For Everyone from the CEO to the Business Intelligence developer and from BI and Data architects and analysts to power users and IT managers can use this book to outshine the competition and create the data framework that they need and interactive dashboards using Power BI

SQL Server 2012 Data Integration Recipes provides focused and practical solutions to real world problems of data integration. Need to import data into SQL Server from an outside source? Need to export data and send it to another system? SQL Server 2012 Data Integration Recipes has your back. You'll find solutions for importing from Microsoft Office data stores such as Excel and Access, from text files such as CSV files, from XML, from other database brands such as Oracle and MySQL, and even from other SQL Server databases. You'll learn techniques for managing metadata, transforming data to meet the needs of the target system, handling exceptions and errors, and much more. What DBA or developer isn't faced with the need to move data back and forth? Author Adam Aspin brings 10 years of extensive ETL experience involving SQL Server, and especially satellite products such as Data Transformation Services and SQL Server Integration Services. Extensive coverage is given to Integration Services, Microsoft's flagship tool for data integration in SQL Server environments.Coverage is also given to the broader range of tools such as OPENDATASOURCE, linked servers, OPENROWSET, Migration Assistant for Access, BCP Import, and BULK INSERT just to name a few. If you're looking for a resource to cover data integration and ETL across the gamut of Microsoft's SQL Server toolset, SQL Server 2012 Data Integration Recipes is the one book that will meet your needs. * Provides practical and proven solutions towards creating resilient ETL environments * Clearly answers the tough questions which professionals ask * Goes beyond the tools to a thorough discussion of the underlying techniques * Covers the gamut of data integration, beyond just SSIS * Includes example databases and files to allow readers to test the recipes What you'll learn * Import and export to and from CSV files, XML files, and other text-based sources. * Move data between SQL databases, including SQL Server and others such as Oracle Database and MySQL. * Discover and manage metadata held in various database systems. * Remove duplicates and consolidate from multiple sources. * Transform data to meet the needs of target systems. * Profile source data as part of the discovery process.* Log and manage errors and exceptions during an ETL process. * Improve efficiency by detecting and processing only changed data. Who this book is for SQL Server 2012 Data Integration Recipes is written for developers wishing to find fast and reliable solutions for importing and exporting to and from SQL Server. The book appeals to DBAs as well, who are often tasked with implementing ETL processes. Developers and DBAs moving to SQL Server from other platforms will find the succinct, example-based approach ideal for quickly applying their general ETL knowledge to the specific tools provided as part of a SQL Server environment. Table of Contents * MS Office Data Sources * Flat File Sources * XML Data Sources * SQL Database Sources * SQL Server Sources * Miscellaneous Data Sources * Exporting Data from SQL Server * Metadata * Data Transformation * Data Profiling * Delta Data Management * Change Tracking and Change Data Capture * Optimising Data Import * ET Process Acceleration * Logging and Auditing * Appendix A: Data Types * Appendix B: Sample Databases and Scripts