Monthly Archives: February 2015

Early Preview of Microsoft Power BI Designer – Interactive Charts, Graphs, Maps and Data Query

Microsoft Power BI Designer is built for the analyst. It combines state-of-the-art interactive charts, maps, and graphs, with industry-leading data query built-in. Create and upload your reports to Power BI preview to keep a continuous pulse on our business and access them on a mobile device. Power BI Designer helps you empower others with timely critical insights, anytime, anywhere.

Build reports for Power BI

Rich data transformation and visual analytics experiences help you build reports for Power BI.

Download HERE

Power BI Designer is a dedicated report authoring tool for the Power BI Preview service. The Power BI Designer provides rich data transformation and visual analytics in a unified, seamless experience. The Power BI Designer enables you to create impactful reports with state-of-the-art interactive charts, maps, graphs, and data transformations. Upload your reports to the Power BI preview and empower others with timely critical insights on any device, anywhere.

Help build the future of Power BI

Download an early preview of the Power BI Designer and give us feedback on how we can make your day easier. We’re planning frequent updates so you’ll get the latest changes delivered right to you.

Connect to all your data

Excel spreadsheets, on-premises data sources, Hadoop datasets, streaming data, and cloud services — Power BI brings all your data together so you can start analyzing it in seconds.

Your data made beautiful

Power BI puts visual analytics at your fingertips with intuitive report authoring. Drag and drop to place content exactly where you want it on the flexible and fluid Designer canvas. Quickly discover patterns as you explore a single, unified view of linked, interactive visualizations.

Transform and clean data

Getting your data ready to analyze is hard. We’re on a mission to make it much easier. Try the data shaping and modeling capabilities of Power BI and take back hours in your busy day.

Complete analytics life-cycle

The Power BI Designer is an elegant end-to-end solution for building analytics for the Power BI preview. The Designer has all the capabilities to quickly connect, shape, visualize, and share data insights through Power BI.

Design once, view anywhere

We know you need to get data into the hands of decision makers when and where they need it. Power BI makes publishing and sharing your beautiful interactive reports easy.

OneNote is now (even more) free!

v2

Starting today you’ll be able to access the full power of OneNote on your PC, including these features previously reserved for paid editions:

  • Password protected sections—Add a password to protect sensitive information.
  • Page history—Easily see or go back to prior versions of a page.
  • Audio and video recording—Take notes while recording, and easily jump to the relevant section later.
  • Audio search—Search for a word in a voice or video recording.
  • Embedded files—Insert Office documents or other files directly in your notebook.

The free edition of OneNote stores your notes on OneDrive for easy access across all your devices and works whether you’re online or offline.  With your free Microsoft account, you’ll get 15 GB of OneDrive space for free and no limits on the number of notes you can create or sync.

OneNote 2013 runs on Windows 7 and Windows 8 and is available for free from onenote.com/download.

Power Map for Excel–February update for Office 365

New Power Map for Excel Features

Data cards–Tooltips the way you want them!

Data cards extends the Power Map tooltip to let you display more contextual information about the data on your map. This becomes powerful when you need to quickly drill down into the details behind the columns and pie chart visualizations, like showing a list of Olympic events and associated medal count spanning a time period for a specific country. Just hover over or click any visualization on the map and a data card is displayed with easily readable information about the geo, height, category and time related to the data point.

Power Map Feb 1

You can also customize the data cards to fit your data exploration and presentation needs. Some of the options available are:

  • Add/remove/change aggregation of data fields
  • Add a title (e.g. location name)
  • Re-order the data fields
  • Rename the data field headers
  • Select from a set of layout templates

Below is an example of a customized data card. Notice that event a series of data (from aggregate values) can be displayed, allowing you to drill down into the more interesting details of the data on your map.

Power Map Feb 2

Learn more about how to create and customize data cards and let us know what you think about this new feature.

Heat map improvements

Using heat map visualizations in Power Map tours is great way to see trends and outliers in your data through a color scale. Below is a tour scene with traditional heat map visualizations. This month’s update comes with a few cool new ways you can use heat maps to represent the data just the way you want.

Changing aggregation type

The traditional heat map only showed sum data. Now you can use heat maps to represent other aggregation types, like average. By changing the aggregation type, an option in the Layer Options tab, we were able to display the average cost of new construction projects in the greater Seattle Area.

Power Map Feb 3

Power Map Feb 4

Customizing the color scale

The traditional heat map displayed points with a color scale ranging from blue to green, yellow and red. To better represent your data, it may be more effective to display your data across just a portion of this color scale or choose an entirely different color scale all together. Also under the Layer Options tab, you will find an option to change the color of your heat map visualizations. Select Custom in the drop down and then just choose the colors you want to include. Using the same tour scene, we changed the heat map colors to just blue and red.

Power Map Feb 5

With these new customizations, what you can do with heat map visualizations is really limited to the data you have. Imagine an accumulated image of precipitation measurements of over 30 years can be made to look like with these options in Power Map.

Power Map Feb 6

 

Power Map for Excel is available with any Office 365 subscription that includes Office desktop apps. To use Power Map, open Excel and go to Insert > Map.

If you have automatic updates enabled for your Office 365 subscription, you should receive this Power Map update soon. If you don’t have automatic updates enabled in Excel, go to File > Account > Update Options > Update Now.

Learn about all the powerful analytics and visualization features in Excel and take your analysis further by sharing and collaborating on business insights with colleagues using Power BI.