Planning for business intelligence adoption - Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 - page 34

As an alternative, users start looking outside the approved sources because they need to get infor-
mation to make decisions. They might get information from wherever they can find it internally; they
might get it from external business partners; and maybe they'll find some data on industry trends that
they can download from an Internet site. In short, they wind up manually compiling a lot of data. The
bottom line is that the data they need for making decisions on a day-to-day basis is not being inte-
grated into the corporate system, and that's the problem that self-service BI is intended to solve.
Due to the overlap with organizational and team BI communities, we've already touched on the
tools commonly used by this community: Excel, Power View in Excel, PowerPivot in Excel, Report
Builder, Power View in SharePoint, and Visio. Casual users are more likely to use Excel and Report
Builder, whereas power users might use any of these tools, as applicable to the task at hand. A user
can use any of these tools to create a document for personal reference or can share the document
with a team BI community by publishing it to a SharePoint document library.
How would a user decide which tool to use? Let's review the characteristics of the documents
produced by each tool.
Excel Excel is a tool commonly preferred by users of all skill levels for ad hoc reporting and analy-
sis. Users can retrieve data from data sources and combine it with manual data. A user can import
data and then manipulate the data by creating charts, sorting, filtering, and applying a wide range of
calculations from simple to complex. Casual users might use Excel for simple summing and averaging
of data, whereas power users might create complex forecasting models or tabular models combining
multiple data sources. Power users can also create PivotTables from raw data or from Analysis Services
data sources for analysis using aggregate functions to summarize data grouped on rows and columns
and using filters and slicers to focus on a subset of data. Although the creation of a PivotTable is
generally a task for the power user, a casual user can easily explore a PivotTable that has already been
created.
Excel is ubiquitous in many organizations, so most users already have a passing familiarity with this
tool. Even if they don't create the workbooks themselves, they can access workbooks from SharePoint
and, as long as they have the right permissions, download workbooks for personal use. Then, they can
apply calculations, filter the data, and make other changes to the data without affecting the original
workbook.
Power View in Excel Power users and casual users alike can easily create a data model based
on one more data sources, even if the data contains more than a million rows. Users don't need to
understand relationships between tables created by drawing together data from disparate sources,
and Excel can recommend relationships based on its analysis of the contents of data from each
source. After creating the data model, users can add a Power View sheet to visualize and explore the
data model, as described in Chapter 5. Exploration starts by adding fields from the model to a table,
and then converting the table to some other type of visualization, such as a matrix, column chart,
pie chart, or map, to name a few. Not only can the user quickly and easily change the visualization,
but relationships in the data can be discovered through highlighting data shared across multiple
visualizations. Better understanding of trends over time can be discovered through animated scatter
and bubble charts. Users can also further explore the data by applying filters to all visualizations or a
single visualization on the sheet.