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Transcript
Introduction
0:00
So, hello everybody and thank you for attending the webinar today on Power BI. Just a few housekeeping rules to start with. So, all attendees will remain on mute for the whole webinar. If you do have any questions, then please use the question box and it will be answered after the demo. If we do run out of time or if the question requires longer answer then it’ll be answered offline directly. Please note that a link to view the webinar recording will be sent to you all after the demo.
0:36
So, I’d like to introduce the webinar. This is part of the top five things series that we have. This is the 11th in the series. You can sign up to one or you can sign up tall and we do send emails out regularly, or you can have a look in our newsletter for upcoming webinars.
0:58
My name is Karen. I’ll be facilitating the demo today and I have been at T Vision now for nearly two years. My background is software account management experience working for ERP companies. Ben is going to be doing the demo today and he is a consultant here. He’s been working TVision for nearly two years as well and has been using NAV since 2013 having implemented NAV as a customer.
1:28
Okay, so Power BI is part of Microsoft Suite of power applications, which also include power apps and Flow. Using Power BI, you can create dashboards and data connections that give teams instant access to key performance indicators in an intuitive environment designed for secure collaboration. Power BI lets you to connect to NAV and Business Central in order to view performance, customers, sales and finance metrics in a visual and interactive way. In this webinar we will help answer the following questions using some Power BI report examples. So, to start with what is Power BI and is it right for me, who are the reports for and why, how are you going to manage and prepare that data, what’s the rollout and adoption plan? And how do I get started?
2:18
So, before the demo, I would actually like to launch a poll just to find out what you would potentially be requiring from a reporting system. It might not be that it that’s what it does now, but what would you like for the future? So, I’m just going to launch if you could put your answers in that would be brilliant. We’ll wait a minute or so for everybody to put in their answers and then I’ll let you know the results afterwards.
3:00
Okay, just going to wait for another couple of people to vote.
3:09
Okay, so I mean it’s actually quite interesting 75% of people have actually said that they would like all of the options there. So, to remind you the options were create real-time visual dashboard that you can drill into, the ability to create your own, reports of the historic data. So, I what I will do now is I’ll hand over to Ben for the demo. Please do remember to use the question box. If you do wish to answer question and it will be answered after the demo.
Demo
Thanks Karen. So just before I start a pre-recorded this just so that I could demo quite a few things rather than you have to watch me doing bits and pieces. So, it’s broken down into sort of short snippets which obviously taking over but it wasn’t me that did it and hopefully what you’ll see is its intuitive and relatively simple to get started on things. So here we go.
4:06
So first of all, we’re going to have a look at how to get data into Power BI. So, we’re using Power BI desktop here, which is freely downloadable. If you just search for Power BI and go to the link then you can do that. So here we are looking at the data and I’m just going to show you all the data types that Power BI can import. So clearly Azure is big for Microsoft at the moment and what you’ll hopefully see there is Dynamics 365 Business Central both on-premise and Cloud. So, software as a Service and Dynamics NAV, so they are all standard connectors that are in there. How they actually work is its through Odata so through web services so we can create queries or pages. We can publish as Odata services that can then be consumed by Power BI as data sources. For today though what I’m going to use is I’m actually just going to use a SQL database. It’s a freely downloadable one that Microsoft provide. So just as an example now.
5:06
What I’m going to show you today is not going to be anything different from what you could do in NAV if you had a direct connection to that through web services. It’s just for the purposes of this it gives me a much more stable and consistent way to be able to demo it. So, you can see there’s various types of connecting. I’m going to import this data, but you can do a direct query for certain things. Now, one of the things you do need here, just as I find the data that I want to at the moment. What I’m going to do is I’m just going to bring up a sales table. So stacked internet sales as I said, its demo data provided by Microsoft so I can just have a quick preview of that data and see all the information that’s in there. Not too concerned about what’s in there, but I can also then edit stuff as well. But for these purposes, I’m just going to load it straight in.
5:51
I know it’s like just a second as it brings that data into the model. So, then what I have on the right here is I’ve got fields which are all the data from the table which I brought in and then visualizations. So, the visualizations are really being able to interact with it. So, you can see here as I go up and down the fields, the different types. Now what you will need you need to know sort of what the data is in there. So, this is quite a well-structured data source, so I’m just going to take the order date into there and what you’ll see is that Power BI has already taken what is a date range and converted it into a set of hierarchies. So, you’ve got the year, the quarter, the month and the day so I don’t need to do anything with that and then I’m going to take the sales amount. So, the sales amount is per transaction here and the little sign that you can see next to it that actually shows you that it’s going to sum it up. So, this is all raw data at the moment, and I’ve just created a nice chart to split their sales by year.
6:49
So, 2010 2011 2012 2013 Etc. So just some of the options is to tidy up this a bit. So, I’m just going to change the axes and make it categorical. So, I get every single year in there and then some of the other bits and pieces you can do as well. So, I’ve got all the data all the colours, sorry, that I can change and you can do quite a lot on these in terms of want you to sort of make these visually appealing so you’ve got being able to base the colour scheme based on values within there. I’m not going to do that in this sense, but you can do it based on other information as well as it doesn’t have to be directly on the thing which you’re putting in as a measure and you can see here. I can also manually colour these if I want to so I want the particular year to be red, another one to yellow for example. But I’m just going to have to have done. This is just reset it back. Now that change I made in that is specific to that visualization that so unfortunately doesn’t carry over but this is where we can start to have a look at what we can do. So, I’m starting to drill into the data here. So as I click on the year and click on the quarter, it’s taking me to the month data, not a full year of data and then into the actual day, so that’s following the hierarchy that it’s automatically created based on the order day, and this is just showing me the sales per day than and I can navigate back up to get to the detail that I want, but then actually what I can do is I can make that hierarchy shared so you can see the years and the quarters and here again I can then manipulate some of the filtering on here. So, in this case, I’m just going to put a filter in on the year just to restrict some of the data down and the reporting filtering. This can be done in various levels. So, in this case, I’m just doing on this visualization. You can do it for a whole report if you want, so if you wanted it to just be for a specific year you can do that as well.
8:39
So, we’re just going to go on to the next one now. And what we’re going to have a look at here is bringing in some additional data. So just starting off. I’ve got quite a raw set of data in here and this is quite typical of a sales transaction table. And if I just have a look at the product key, so it’s automatically tried to create graph there for me, but I’m just going to change that to a table. It’s just done a count of the number of product keys I’ve got in there. Now, that’s not that useful as a field because it’s just going to be a number which represents the product. So, if I want any more product data, then I haven’t got it in this table at the moment. And this is where you are then sort of looking at building up a data set. So, what I’m going to do is bring in some additional data so I can get some context in there. So, I’m just going to go into my manage data source, and this is using power query which comes as part of it. Just going to re-open up that connection.
9:36
And then have a hunt in the table list for the one which I want. So again, I’m just seeing that I’m just going to bring the customer because I need that bit later and the product and then some categorization on the products as well.
9:52
And again, I can preview this data in here if I want to I can also edit it, but I don’t need to in this case. So, I’m just going to bring that in and again gives me the option as to how I want to do that. I’m just going to import it in this instance and you can see there. It’s loaded that up and it’s loaded up a preview of the data. So now here’s my customer table. So, you know, this is quite this is you know, looking at the raw data, so it’s not very exciting but it’s all about data preparation quite commonly. I mean quite often you will need to manipulate some of that data. So, in this case I’ve got gender which is M or F. And actually, what I want to do is transform it. So rather than saying M, I actually wanted to say male or female and again, it’s all designed around ease of use. So, I’m just going to use replace values on here by right clicking.
10:44
Very simple and intuitive going to find an M. I’m going to replace it with the actual text I want and that’s done that and what you see is over on the right in the applied steps. It’s added in the step that I’ve done and you can see at the top there the actual code that it’s written which it’s using. I didn’t write that just use the tool to be able to do that. And I’m going do the same for female if I can spell it right. Hit OK and it’s replaced that as well.
11:13
Another thing. I’m just going to get rid of the email address because it’s not important for what I need so I can just remove that data. So again, you can tidy up your data source within Power BI itself as part of your data preparation. So, for this instance, I’m just going to remove that one, but it’s always best practice to try and remove data where it’s not going to be used. Just going to close that and that’s going to load this data into the data model. So just take a few seconds to do that.
11:39
Just one thing to bear in mind. If you are importing a lot of data, you may want to for the purposes of designing or building it, actually restrict the amount that you bring in so you probably don’t want to bring in 10 years’ worth of data for building a report. You probably want to bring in a year and then once you’re happy with it, expand that out. So now I’ve brought in the data and we’ll just have a quick look at that. So, within the Power BI workspace itself. I can have a look at some of the information. So, here’s all my customer information so the first name in there, so maybe I don’t want that, not interested in name. So again, within the client I can delete that and do some things to it. Now the important thing though to be able to build a really good data model is having relationships. And because this is a well-prepared set of data Power BI is actually identified those relationships and you can see there it’s done on the same name. So, product category key in one table is product category key in another one.
12:35
So, it’s quite obvious which one is so if it’s got an obvious link like that is going to try and create that link for you. We can just see how you do it through a user interface as well as just selecting the ones that you want done it all for me, then it’s created all those connections for me automatically. I’ve not had to do anything. But as I said, this is well-prepared data as its demo data. As you can see here the link from those sales to the customer. So, I’m just going to go back and I’m going to have a look at my products now. What I want to do is be able to bring in some detail. So, I’m going to add in the English description into that table and okay not quite the right one that I wanted. So that’s a full text description. So, I’m just going to put in the product name instead, clear that and now I’ve got the product name.
13:18
I’m just going to find the item number as well. So, the product key drag that in and you can see here. It’s done a count here. So, I’m just need to change that and not summarize it because I don’t need to summarize in this I want the actual value. So, what’s the point of that? Well, actually this is where you can start to interact with the report. So, as I start to drill into it, you should see that on the right some of the data is going to change. So, I’m just going to add in some more data just so we can see that so I’m going to go back to my sales data. I’m going to put sales amount into this table now because the relationship is there I can actually join data between these two tables very easily. So, it’s just a case of dragging and dropping but it’s obviously requires that relationship to be there. So now as I drill into the data, which should see is that the item list is going to change and the sales amounts are going to change as well.
14:10
So, quarter 3 here and you can see that it’s now got a different sales amount different value. Actually. I want to be able to do some other bits on here. So, what I’m going to do is I’m just going to sort this.
14:23
So, I’m just going to sort that by descending. That’s created a sort order for me. So again, as I start to navigate through it, you should see it’s all changing. now. I just want to tidy it up a bit as well because you can see there’s some that are going to multiple decimals so that one with little halfway down, 362, the mountain bike. I’ve got loads of decimals. So actually, I’m just going to go to the modelling, again very simple. How do I want this data to be? I’m going to put it a whole number so I get some consistency. It’s going to give me a little warning because actually going to change the date of this imported click OK on that and now it’s gone nicely no decimal places. So, it’s just a whole number so just makes it a little easier to visualize and you don’t even have to worry about necessarily how that data has actually been brought in you can change it within the model to make it data that you need now just going to change this visual as well. It was a table before I want to make this into a matrix and I’m just going to start putting in some other bits.
15:26
So again, Well I want to do is I just want to be able to have a look at this over years. Again when I start filtering what you’ll see is it filters in 2013 on the growth and my table changes.
15:39
Perhaps what I want to do now is just actually have some more detail in there so I want quarters as well. So again, now if I click on that, I’m actually going to get the quarterly breakdown for that year. So, as you interact with one part of the visual what actually happens on the rest of it is that it’s going to update which is really great for being able to explore data and trying to understand what’s driving data so you can use something graphical on the left for example, and then actually get down to detailed level on a table or something like that on the right.
16:12
So now I’m just going to go on to my next slide. So, what you should see here is it’s changed slightly. So, I spent a bit of time and just built a quick report. So, we’ll just go through this and have a quick look at this. So, this didn’t take me particularly long time to build these rules pre-canned visualizations. So, we’re going to look at now is just some of the bits and pieces on here.
16:35
Let’s just start here. So, I’ve got a bar chart and they are all visualizations so you can see I’ve got some filters up here. So, what I’ve done I’ve taken a slicer. So that’s a way to filter the data. I’ve just done some formatting on there. So, for example, I’ve made it so I’ve got some colouring and some orientations. I made it into buttons by selecting it being horizontal. I’ve got an order month Now I just done something in here just to make that data easier. So, there’s a little calculated column in there which isn’t hard to do actually and I’ll just show you this. So, I’m just going to put in a new column here.
17:17
It’s going to take a second to just load that up. And what you see is that I’ve got a new column in the formula bar at the top now I can enter in some stuff. So, I’m going to put in an order month name and just equals and then it’s intellisense. So, as I start typing I can pick which dates on the order date and then of that I actually want the month just hit enter. So, I’ve not had to really understand an awful lot about this. I’ve been able to just quickly go into that and just type that in and it’s helped me to do that. And now if I just look at the actual raw data in here, go to that. I’m just going to scroll over and have a look and it’s put in the order month name for me. So now I can have a nicely displayed order month name in there if I so wish. I’m going to leave that on the date, actual numbers. So then just some other bits as well. I’m just going to have a look at my customers and the geography and you can see I’ve got a country filter in there. So, I’m just using some country filters to be able to display stuff and then obviously I’ve got a map. I’m so if you want a map so useful to have some filtering and some countries on there.
18:21
So, what I’ve done here is I’ve taken the country that’s a country code and a city and just changing the filter there. So actually, I’m just looking at the country itself adding in another level so now but the country and the city so Australia and Perth, for example. There are various types of maps available. So I’ve just added another one here and again I can add in data from two tables here so I can add in the product category and subcategory and then interact with that and drill down into if you want but actually I’m just going to leave in the product subcategory this and the matrix which I’ll show you an example of early I’ve just built a slightly tidier one of that and you can see now I’ve got the category, subcategory and products name just showing the category and subcategory here and I can drill up to get to various levels or drill down and spill those out which is what I’ve done here and put the date across the top and I’m just interested in years and the sales amount and actually I’ve done some nice quick graphical representation using some conditional formatting. And again, this is all simple to do just to be able to visualize that data in a nicer way and I could do by colour on the front I could do about background colour. I’ve chosen based tables and this example and there’s lots of controls over. How are you want to do that as well? So, what’s the point of doing all this? Well, that’s when we start using these filters on the left that we start to get more interaction. So, you can see all the start filtering that’s applied a field across all the data and across all of my visualizations to show me what’s in there. So, my everything’s updated based on that.
20:01
So, I’m actually going to compare say what the sales in December across different years. Well, I’ve left the year filter blank just filtered on the month 12 so you can see differences in the sales. So, 2013 is actually a bumper year for December and again see the differences by product categories and perhaps I’m then interested in just looking at the U.S. So, you can see actually the map’s now zoomed In And if I look at this in Lakewood, I can see what the sales and that was like a drill further into that so I can drill across things as well so I can drill on some of the filters and then the map and then get some graphical representation. So, you can see that, not that clear, but the charts all updating to be that that particular value which I filtered on.
20:44
And as you can see a lot of that has been done without any code as well. So not a lot that I have to do.
20:51
So, this is where it becomes really powerful for exploring data. So rather than having kind of like a set of numbers, which you’ve got to look at actually it’s a very visual so you don’t need to pull through a spreadsheet and have a look at things to be able to do that. You can get a really visual representation of things that really helps you to kind of get the data out.
21:13
So now I’m just going to have a look at some of the other things that are in here. So, you can see here the sales amount. It’s actually done some nice data. It’s done a nice measure for me. It’s summed it up, but then I might want to do some comparatives and this is where there’s some help and guidance in here. So, I’m doing some quick measures just right clicked on it.
21:35
And there’s loads of fields, loads and loads of types you can do in here, but I’m just going to pick one to do automatically. So, I’m going to do a year over year change. So, what do I want to look at? Want sales amount again, and I need the date. So, I’m just going to find the date that I want. I am using order date here. I’m going to add that in and then this is automatically going to generate some code for me. So again, yep, you can write this code if you know how to but actually it helps you to do it for you and we’ll see once it’s just done that for us got new one sales amount year over year and it’s actually written that formula. So, I’ve not written that formula. I’ve just used the inbuilt function that’s created a formula for me don’t need to worry too much about what it’s doing. But essentially that is a way to get a year-on-year comparison. Okay. So very low code. I’ve just done that took me a few clicks of a mouse. I want to start using that now so actually I’m going to put that into my matrix view so let’s have a look at the sales amount year on year.
22:34
Unsee the variance and that’s done it for me. So, if I just scroll over here, I’m having a look at the bikes one we can see we’re massively up between 2010 and 11. I’m just going to go up the category to clean up a little bit. They can see that actually between 2011 and 2012 we lost 17.46% of sales. So actually, really good useful insight very quickly without actually having to write any code here.
23:04
And as I saw, as we saw, there’s absolutely loads of them in there to help you with that. The other useful thing is that there are tooltips so I can hover over this and it’s going to give me some sales amounts, but maybe I actually want some more contextual information. So, I’m just going to put in the year on year calculation then when I hover over it now we see it’s actually bringing that. So, you can add as many of these in as you want. So, the bubbles in that are going to be one particular size, but the data on there it’s going to be based on the calculations in there. And again, this works is you start to filter down. So, when I look at 2013. It’s only showing me the sales for 2013 in there. I drill down into it all the all the graphics of the visualizations on the screen are going to filter down to that value as well. So, a great way to be able to explore the data which is in there.
23:51
So that’s great. So, at the moment, what we’ve done is we’ve put everything into a Power BI desktop report, but the real power of Power BI is the fact that it’s a service. So, it’s as a software as a service or software as a service but a platform as a service provided by Microsoft currently. It’s sev£7.50 per user per month. So, the desktop version which is what I’ve been showing you there’s no cost to that. This is a great way to download that free connected to a data source that you want and then be able to do some stuff but really, it’s when you want to share reports that you need to have a license and be able to publish us. I’m just going to quickly walk through that.
24:35
So, you see I’m signed in with my credentials there and I’m just going to hit the publish button. It’s going to ask me to save it which would be sensible.
24:47
And then it’s just going to do that for me in the background. So, what this is actually doing is it’s loading my report that I’ve created, just going to put it into my workspace. You can see about some other ones that I’ve prepared previously in there and it’s just going to spend a minute or so publishing that up there. Now what it’s doing is putting the structure of the report up this all the visualizations and things like that, but the data will need to be refreshed separately. So, if you’ve got a large data set it’s not going to publish it and then do it. So that’s great. That’s now uploaded that so just took a minute or so. And I’m just going to jump on to the next one now or I’ve jumped into the actual website you can see I’m at app.powerbi.com. logged in as me and my report which are called webinar, funnily enough, is there so I’m just going to have a quick look at that in the client. So, what I’ve got, a data set that’s the raw data and you see when it was last refreshed there and I’ve got some options around what I want to do with that, you have workbook, don’t have any of those.
25:45
And then I’ll get the report. The report is what I was working on there and you see all the options I’ve got in here. So, what do I want to do: analyse in Excel, quick insights and things like that related reports which open that up and what you should see is that what I had just done and published is now on the website. So again, it’s all through active directory and I get the same control. So, what I’m actually going to do as well is just create a dashboard because this is where it’s great to be able to highlight some of these things and surface and so you’ve got the report and you have multiple reports, but then I got dashboards and maybe actually this dashboard. I want it to be nice on a phone. So, I can design into on a phone so that if I’m on the go I can access this there really is any data anywhere really so here you can see I’m just going to quickly drag it around and you can have lots of tiles on that, just a quick look at that.
26:45
Go back to the Web View and this is the dashboard now think of this this is a very simple example, but you might have lots of KPIs and actually that could be shared across many reports. So, one dashboard could contain data or pinned data from lots of reports. So, think about it in KPIs are a really important things that you want to be able to do and the idea of these is that it gives you the key information at a glance, but then you can go into that and look at the underlying data behind that so just click on that. And actually, what I’ve done is I’ve gone into my report so you just don’t necessarily have to know how to navigate the report. They can navigate from their dashboard and be taken to the report.
27:24
So again, it’s straight back into that straight back into the same data as we saw earlier loads of power here as well. So, the other things are once it’s up in the cloud. Then I can do some neat stuff using machine learning things like that. So, I’m just going to do some insights.
27:45
So, view the insights and what it’s done. It’s just iterated through that and tried to surface some information and I can’t say at the moment whether or not any of this information is any good. I haven’t looked in any detail. But okay. So, the sales stuff around the pricing to trying to create I understand where patterns might be. So, whether there’s correlation things like that. So, you see here if its twenty to a hundred or under 10 that actually it seems to that we have more promotion. So actually, that could be useful but bear in mind any data that you’ve put in there. So, if you’ve got a particular way of categorizing your customers or your jobs or your sales or your items or anything like that actually all of those are available and be part of the analysis that will get done automatically. So again, just look at the quick insights and I can actually get to that from the report as well bit quicker this time.
28:38
It just takes a couple of minutes to run that usually in the background. Now really the important thing is actually we want to be able to share that data, so it’s a well and good me being able to access it. Actually, other people in my organization need to be able to hold on to that. So, I’m just going to quickly share that and so I’m just going to find Karen in here.
28:59
So, Karen’s just been entered there and not going to put in a message for her. I can just hit the share button in the second and then that’s going to do that. See who’s to access to it. Actually, we’re going to share it just going to share that now and Karen would have got an email which means that she can log in. She needs to have a license. So, she’s not got an assigned license. She won’t be able to access it. But again, I can change the permissions so change her that she can read it only she can only get the data and then manage versions easily. So, it’s easy to remove people, change things about and stuff like that. But again, that relies on a person being an owner or an admin on this very simple then to be able to share data. So, I’m aware that we are running slightly over time now, so I’m just going to skip this next one which was going to be about the phone layout. So just touching a bit more on the detail of what we showed you earlier in terms of the phone layout.
29:54
But again, if people are interested in that than please reach out to us by email and we can look at some of those things but just obviously aware of everybody’s time. So just going to pass some stuff back to Karen quickly.
Questions
30:10
Thanks very much Ben so I’m going to open it up to some questions now, please do use question box if you have any. So, we have one here with the map visualization. Can you drill down to post code location to get a view down to street level? Yes, you can and again it uses Bing Maps so uses the Bing Maps API. So yes, is a simple answer that there are usually some funnies around it. So, if you post data if your post code data is not very good you’re going to have a problem and you probably want to look at how you are restricting it. So sometimes you get post codes that could be International. So, you might have a post code that actually exists in more than one country and sometimes it will pick the wrong country for you. So, it just becomes something like restricting it to UK only addresses or something like that. But yeah, you can get down to whatever level you want to be able to do it.
31:04
Okay, so it says another question. How long would it take for a user to become proficient in using Power BI. It’s good question. I guess it depends on how you define proficient. So, the stuff that I showed you that was all sort of done in real time although I pre-recorded it but I knew where to look. There’re loads of resources online. So actually, if you go to the Power BI website, there’s loads of guided learning on that and I think actually creating this simple data model. So, the information I’ll show you on there was sales amount and it’s automatically summed up is a Formula language, which is Dax. So, learning that takes time and investment actually, if you’ve got kind of like relatively simple sales reports are I want to know how much I’ve sold. I want to know what the cost was and this doesn’t have to be product. It could be jobs, time anything, like that or even general ledger entry summing those up then it will do most of the hard work for you.
32:03
It’s only really when you start getting more complex, which you need to invest in time. As I said, there’s loads of guided learning and help on the Power BI website and great forums as well for support. Another one here is how do you auto refresh the data? So, once you’ve published it into the cloud to into the service, it depends on how you’re connecting. So, it’s like an Odata connection. Then you just set the refresh frequency on that and provide the credentials typically you are going to refresh overnight so daily. If it’s an on-premise SQL database, then you need to install something called the Power BI Gateway and then that sits on your server and acts as a bridge between your on-premise server and the service. So basically, the data goes through that and again, it’s just a case of then setting that up and setting that up is really very easy. There’s obviously permissions and stuff like that. So, it’s an administrative task to do and then once it’s published to the cloud that’s when the owner of that report or the administrator of it can set a refresh frequency. Power BI is a shared service. So, if you if you’re building huge data sets and you’re a big Enterprise you can you can buy reserved space basically so processing power, but if you’re talking about loads and loads of data, then there are some quirks around what you may need to look at with that. So, it tends to be then the you’re going to have to either you want a cube which is going to be an on-premise data source or perhaps in Azure which will using Power BI on as a front end. Then it just depends on the data, but we can help and advise on that, you know, if you want to explore that further. Okay, just one more does TVision offer to create reports as a service. Yes. We do. So, we work in partnership with clients to understand it again. It’s what do you want out of it? And really, it’s that question is one of the key ones at the outset and there’s various aspects to it. One is understanding the data source. So, where are we going to get the data from? So could be web services if you’ve got a NAV on-premise version actually probably best to do it through SQL, understanding how much data because that might be some of these sort of infrastructure that’s needed and if they’re not talking about huge data sets and huge datasets appreciate doesn’t give you a definitive figure then actually you can connect directly quite easily and then the building of the reports creating all the measures and things like that we do as a service. So, the data preparation, getting the data which, we usually do and perhaps in partnership with you as well. And that’s understanding what you want to get out of it and then actually building the report.
34:59
Once you have built the report we can hand that over to you, provide some training and then you change Report because it’s all graphical. It’s all just drag-and-drop essentially and once you go a good data set and good measures in there, actually if you to be able to use them and change how things look it’s quite self-service at that. You then typically would come to us to say actually we’ve got this new metric this new thing we want to measure so that’s what we typically do that. But yeah, absolutely we do we do that as a service. We love to we’d love to help people.
Key takeaways and close
Okay? Thanks Ben. That’s great. There were another couple of questions we don’t have time for but we will answer them directly afterwards. So, I’d like to leave you with the 5 key takeaways about Power BI which we hope will assist you. So, Power BI will change the way that you see reporting. It’s all about creating data sets for people to explore looking at the information that’s important to them. It will take a mind shift away from static report, so specifically requested. As a result, finance and IT departments can be freed up from needing to create ad hoc and scheduled reports for other departments and management. If you’re already using Office 365 then all you need to in order to create powerful dashboards is a Power BI license subscription. However, whilst this is a low cost of entry, creating these dashboards does require high level of skill than those who may currently be creating your static reports. So, it’s worth investigating what skill gaps you may have and if you can get the training. So once you’ve decided the Power BI is right for your company, you need to have a rollout strategy whilst it may be tempting to advertise Power BI across the business straight away, you may end up being asked for many dashboards all at once so start with the ones that include your most powerful most important business KPIs, the one which you can achieve the quickest actionable insight and then plan for the next phase.
36:49
Once people who view the dashboards have had some basic training they can explore the data as they wish, drilling down into the key areas for them. The solution is very intuitive and it’s important that as new dashboards are published you notify the relevant people and encourage continued use and finally it’s important to remember that data is key. You do need to be confident that the data you have in NAV or Business Central is clean and correct. If not, then people who view the dashboards may very quickly tell you that the data is wrong and that may blame Power BI thus reducing the uptake in usage.
37:24
Okay, so we hope you found this webinar interesting and informative As I mentioned at the beginning this is the 11th in the series is continued from last year, but we do have a schedule for this year. This is on our website. So please have a look at the ones you might want to register for.
37:44
Okay, so I’m going to close session now, and the survey will appear. Be great if you could respond with some feedback, so as I mentioned the questions that we couldn’t have time to answer will answer directly. But if you do think of anything else that you want to ask us about Power BI after the webinar, feel free to email me at marketing@tvisiontech.co.uk.
