BI Book – Excel as BI Front-End Tool

I’m very happy to announce that finally I submit the chapter for the next MVP Deep Dives Book that I’m a co-author with some other MVP professionals around the world. The book will be published next October and for sure I’ll give you here more news about it.

The chapter I wrote, explains the construction of an Excel Dashboard from an IT and Business perspective in a retail sector scenario. It was not intended to explain the best way to create a dashboard for the retail sector, but to describe some tips and tricks for a low-cost dashboard using a familiar tool commonly implemented across organizations: Excel.

Excel 2010 seems to be the strongest candidate to be chosen as preferable tool. It's certainly true that Excel 2010 doesn't yet have the design features of some BI Front-End competitors, but the low cost and welcome acceptance from end users are big advantages to it. Naturally, there are huge commercial interests in favour of more robust solutions that generally stand by their promises, but in turn, the return on the investment (ROI) is the question.

The dashboard created along the chapter is shown in the previous figure. I highlight the fact that beyond this dashboard, information is centralized inside an OLAP cube, and the dashboard was created without any line of code! At one hand, you make IT department satisfied (because they still control data quality, data governance…) and at another hand, business has the freedom to create their own dashboards and reports not only through Excel 2010, but also through Report Builder 3.0.

All the money from the book sales will be donated to charity. And the organization selected by almost co-authors of this book is the Operation Smile. I hope you buy this book to learn new things but also to help to make the difference for these children! For those interested in doing more charity work, check out Social Work Degree.

I'll keep you informed about book published date!

BI Conference - TechDays 2010 - After my session

Finally I have some time to describe what I experienced last week during the TechDays Portugal conferences. Today I’m writing my post nrº100 and could not do it better describing this fantastic experience

The facilities
The day before my session I went to see the event facilities and aclimatize myself to the room where I would present my session. There were many people working for this event, and it is important that everyone had the notion that organizing such an event is not easy. It requires lot of human labour and a lot of dedication, mainly from persons like Luis Martins, João Bilhim and Leonor (Microsoft) and several other amazing dedicated persons

The people
I met many people and also spoke with people who normally only contact via the Web. Is indeed a very interesting event, where people share knowledge and opinions that for sure is more important than if the lunch is good or bad! Jorge Paulino, Ricardo Peres, André Lage, Rodrigo Pinto, MVP guys, Jorge Moura, Nuno Batalha, Tiago Rente, and a lot of enthusiastic professionals

The Session
Most people, certainly should not have a notion that it was my first public session with so many people... and also, that a year ago never came into my head be presenting a session at TechDays. It was a very difficult challenge trying to pass a message on Data Mining for almost 300 people, mainly because the profiles of the audience was very diverse ... feedback received varied between easy and very difficult session contents. Thanks to all the persons that attended to my session. Well… if you're curious take a look into presentation below:

TechDays 2010 DAT202

I hope you enjoy it... I can translate to english if needed.

BI Tools - First Look to Excel 2010

Create Dashboards never been so easy ... the new version of Excel 2010 (Beta) is really amazing. Exploration of a multidimensional cube has never been so intuitive and simple like it is now. The image below shows a simple dashboard that I made in this new version in 20 minutes for the Northwind database sample...

There still are some features to improve in this version, anyway, the new features promise to make the life of the decision maker easier... and now, I sincerely believe that the democratization of business intelligence is beginning, and finally Business Intelligence will soon be available to all employees of an organization. And all because Excel is the best known tool in the world, where almost users who use a computer, know what Excel is and what Excel do. Many BI Vendors know it, and began to build few years ago, add-ins for Excel in order to take advantage of some previous limitations of Excel. And a question arises ... will these small businesses survive the constant improvement of Excel? Only time will tell whether they will be able to adapt or not with new solutions... I really hope so, becausee this small companies do a big important job… and Microsoft knows that!

As the most interesting features from Excel 2010, I highlight the slicers, the “sparklines”, and the possibility of creating Named Sets through Excel. The Slicers lets you visually filter the data in a PivotTable and quickly extract exactly the data you're looking for. Slicers can be moved and resized like charts and graphs. And each slicer could be connected to several pivot tables… for me it’s really amazing this feature. The “sparklines” is a copy of some products made before by XLCubed (check the SQL Bits session where XLCubed presented “Microcharts”) and it’s in a very early stage. And the last feature that I highlight today, is the possibility to create named sets from Excel, grouping a set of items and several other features like customize MDX statements of a pivot table.

I hope this post was helpfull to you.
regards, Pedro