Database Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 6
Power View
This chapter focuses on building a solution in Power View so you can con-
tinue your data visualization efforts. It covers what Power View is, what the
requirements are to create Power View reports, how to create a report, data
modeling tips, and also how to deploy and share the reports.
wHAT IS PoweR VIew?
Power View is a new reporting feature that was added in Reporting Services 2012.
Power View was created to provide web-based self-service reporting capabilities
to end users. It is designed for rapid data exploration and mash-ups of data from
a tabular BI Semantic Model (BISM). The tabular data model can either be cre-
ated using PowerPivot or Tabular Analysis Services. Users can very quickly create
highly visual and interactive reports with Power View and the experience is greatly
simplified. Report developers no longer have to deal with setting properties
on objects included in the design, worry about relationships in the data, how a
particular visualization will look, or how to connect items together for filtering.
With Power View the property settings are not present like they are with the
other Reporting Services development tools such as Report Builder and Report
Designer. The modeler of the data has already taken care of the relationships in
the data. Power View provides you a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get)
experience, so there's no flipping back and forth between design and preview
anymore to see what your report will look like. Items within Power View reports
are also connected to each other based on how the data is related, so clicking
on an item in a chart legend can automatically filter related data in a table.
Power View is also a new feature in Excel 2013, so now this new functional-
ity is available either as an add-in that you can easily enable in Excel 2013 or
through Reporting Services in SharePoint integration mode. Figures 6-1, 6-2,
and 6-3 show some of the types of visualizations you can do with Power View.
