Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Power BI: The Future
Power BI for Office provides users with powerful new ways to work with data in Excel from a variety of data sources.
It lets you easily search, discover, and access data within and outside your organization and, with just a few clicks,
shape, transform, analyze, and create stunning interactive visualizations out of the data. These visualizations uncover
hidden insights you can share, and you can collaborate from anywhere, on any device. In this section, you will look at
two offerings in the Power BI suite:
•
Power Query
•
Power Map
Power Query is a
mash-up
tool designed to integrate data from heterogeneous data sources through an easy-to-
use, graphical interface. It is available as an add-in to Excel after you download it from the following web site:
Power Map is an upcoming offering that previously was known as GeoFlow. Power Map can be used together
with Power Query to create stunning, three-dimensional visualizations of coordinates plotted over Bing maps. Learn
more about Power Map from the following article on Microsoft Developer Network:
In this section, you will use Power Query to connect to your Windows Azure HDInsight Service and load data
from HDFS to your Excel worksheet. Begin from the Excel toolbar ribbon by clicking
Power Query
➤
From Other
Sources
➤
From Windows Azure HDInsight
as shown in Figure
9-23
.
