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Introduction

      Over the past few years, the concept of self-service business intelligence (BI) has taken over the corporate world. Self-service BI is a form of business intelligence in which end users can independently generate their own reports, run their own queries, and conduct their own analyses, without the need to engage the IT department.

      The demand for self-service BI is a direct result of several factors:

      Recognizing the importance of the self-service BI revolution and the role Excel plays in it, Microsoft has made substantial investments in making Excel a player in the self-service BI arena by embedding both Power Pivot and Power Query directly into Excel.

You can integrate multiple data sources, define relationships between data sources, process analysis services cubes, and develop interactive dashboards that can be shared on the web. Indeed, the new Microsoft BI tools blur the line between Excel analysis and what is traditionally IT enterprise-level data management and reporting capabilities.

      With these new tools in the Excel wheelhouse, it’s becoming important for business analysts to expand their skill sets to new territory, including database management, query design, data integration, multidimensional reporting, and a host of other skills. Excel analysts have to expand their skill set knowledge base from the one-dimensional spreadsheets to relational databases, data integration, and multidimensional reporting.

      That’s where this book comes in. Here, you’re introduced to the mysterious world of Power Pivot and Power Query. You find out how to leverage the rich set of tools and reporting capabilities to save time, automate data clean-up, and substantially enhance your data analysis and reporting capabilities.

About This Book

      The goal of this book is to give you a solid overview of the self-service BI functionality offered by Power Pivot and Power Query. Each chapter guides you through practical techniques that enable you to

      Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.

Foolish Assumptions

      Over the past few years, Microsoft has adopted an agile release cycle, allowing the company to release updates to Microsoft Office and the power BI tools practically monthly. This is great news for those who love seeing new features added to Power Pivot and Power Query. (It’s not-so-great news if you’re trying to document the features of these tools in a book.)

      My assumption is that Microsoft will continue to add new bells and whistles to Power Pivot and Power Query at a rapid pace after publication of this book. So you may encounter new functionality not covered here.

      The good news is that both Power Pivot and Power Query have stabilized and already have a broad feature set. So I’m also assuming that although changes will be made to these tools, they won’t be so drastic as to turn this book into a doorstop. The core functionality covered in these chapters will remain relevant — even if the mechanics change a bit.

Icons Used in This Book

      As you look in various places in this book, you see icons in the margins that indicate material of interest (or not, as the case may be). This section briefly describes each icon in this book.

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