Less capable users, or those without existing Excel skills, will appreciate the simplicity of Power BI Desktop compared to Excel as a client tool.Showing off the capabilities of Power BI Desktop will make selling a SSAS Tabular-based solution much easier, because those visualisations will make a much better first impression on users, even if they do end up using Excel for most of their work.On the other hand, with Power BI Desktop it’s much easier to create something visually arresting quickly, and with the new open-source data visualisation strategy it seems like we’ll be able to use lots of really cool charts and visualisations in the future. While you can do some impressive things in Excel, it generally requires a lot of effort on the part of the user to build a dashboard or report that looks good. Why would you want to do this though? More specifically, why use Power BI Desktop rather than Excel, which is of course the default client tool for SSAS? I’m a big fan of using Excel in combinations with SSAS (pretty much everything Rob Collie says here about Excel and Power Pivot also applies to Excel and SSAS – for the vast majority of users, for real work, Excel will always be the tool of choice for anything data related), but its data visualisation capabilities fall well short of the competition. Therefore even if you are a traditional corporate BI shop that uses SSAS Tabular and you aren’t interested in any kind of self-service BI at all, you could use it just as a client for SSAS and forget about its other capabilities. It is a free download and you can use it without any kind of Power BI subscription at all. The Power BI Desktop app was previously known as the Power BI Designer – the name change was a wise move, because it is in fact a full featured desktop BI tool in itself, and not just a ‘designer’ for the cloud based Power BI service. It is that by RTM the Power BI Desktop app will be able to connect direct to SSAS Tabular – that’s to say, you will be able to use it as a client tool for SSAS Tabular in the same way you can use Excel and any number of third party products. There’s no point me repeating them all, but in amongst the major features announced there was one thing that I thought was worth highlighting and which could easily get overlooked. There has been another flurry of Power BI announcements in the last few days in preparation for RTM on July 24th you can read about them here if you haven’t already.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |