Using Power View in Excel 2013 - Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 - page 131

Setting up Power View
If you decide that Power View is the right choice, you will need to set up your environment correctly
to use it. If you are using only Power View in Excel, you will, of course, need to install Excel 2013. In
addition, you will need to install Silverlight. If Silverlight is not installed, you'll see a warning message
the first time that you try to insert a Power View sheet into your workbook. Fortunately, the message
includes a link that you can use to download Silverlight to make it easy to get set up properly.
Creating visualizations
In this section, we step through the process of creating several different types of visualizations to
introduce you to the key features of Power View. You learn how to add a Power View sheet to your
Excel workbook and then how to add a table as a starting point for any visualization. As we lead you
through the creation of visualizations, we explain important techniques for interacting with visualiza-
tions that are typically applicable to more than one type of visualization.
Getting started
Before you can create visualizations, you must first create a Data Model and then insert a Power View
sheet into an Excel workbook.
Creating a data Model
Although in Power View you can add a Power View sheet to your Excel workbook, you won't be able
to do anything besides selecting a theme or adding a background image. To create any of the visu-
alizations, you need to first prepare your data by creating a data model as we describe in Chapter 4.
At minimum, you can create a table of data manually in an Excel workbook and then select the range
of cells in the table to add to a Data Model. However, you can also import from an external source or
even integrate data from multiple sources to produce a data model.
Note To reproduce the visualizations we describe in this chapter, you can download a sam-
ple workbook that contains a data model based on tables from AdventureWorksDW2012 to
use as a starting point. To create this workbook, we imported the database tables and then
used PowerPivot in Excel to enhance the Data Model to support reporting with Power View
in Excel.
Inserting a Power View Sheet
After a Data Model is added to the Excel workbook, you must add a new sheet to the workbook to
contain the Power View visualizations. To do this, on the ribbon, on the Insert tab, click the Power
View button (located near the center of the ribbon), as shown in Figure 5-5.