A Business Agility e-book. Getting out of Excel Hell Power BI: a guide

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1 A Business Agility e-book Getting out of Excel Hell Power BI: a guide

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3 Business Agility is expert in the delivery of solutions built on Office 365 and SharePoint. 3 We build solutions to both the common and the uncommon. This can be anything from: Intranets, Document Management Systems, workflow processes Migrating you to a new version of SharePoint Planning your information architecture around SharePoint Hosted SharePoint, SharePoint Online and Office 365 Building industry-specific solutions Business Agility Consulting Ltd

4 Getting out of Excel hell: Power BI: a guide Microsoft Excel has become ubiquitous with data management and financial forecasting. It has taken a critical role in key business decision-making, providing complex statistical analysis, all delivered via a user-friendly and, now, very familiar front end. Although Excel is a robust program, the spreadsheets it creates are too breakable. Excel s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness anyone can create a spreadsheet. It relies inherently on the accuracy of the user inputting and manipulating the data - this is where errors begin to creep in. Such programs currently have no audit trails, no way of tracing where the data comes from and there is no simple way of error checking them. When this is combined with a lack of knowledge of how to analyse data or a reluctance to be the one to question convincingly presented numbers, these errors can turn into catastrophes. Using multiple spreadsheets for forecasting, budgeting, planning, and reporting creates all kinds of issues: You waste weeks manually consolidating a mass of individual spreadsheets You can t easily model potential future scenarios or answer what-if? questions Measuring spend against plan involves huge effort Your talented finance staff spend too much time on low-level admin activities You leave yourself open to errors that could leave your plans, forecasts, and budgets redundant The result? You re spending huge amounts of time, energy, and resources fighting against a tool that wasn t designed to do what you need it to do.

5 How many finance professionals relish the prospect of spending weeks consolidating 50 or more departmental plans into a single master plan? Your team didn t spend years earning accountancy degrees and honing their strategic analytical skills to spend so much of their professional lives collecting and consolidating spreadsheets. 5 So, what are your options? Many SMEs and larger organisations look to off the shelf reporting and business intelligence solutions. There are, seemingly, countless products out there out of the box, offering the typical features and benefits: Fast implementation Appealing data visualisation Self-service reporting (be careful!) Data warehousing, In-memory analysis However, these solutions will still rely on plugging in your Excel spreadsheets (and other data sources!). Another option, which can be overlooked, sits nicely in Office 365 s suite of productivity apps. Namely, Power BI. Business Agility Consulting Ltd

6 6 What is Power BI? Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that can deliver insights from your organisation s data. It enables you to connect to hundreds of data sources, simplify data preparation (e.g. for reporting), and drive ad hoc analysis. Why use Power BI? Microsoft Power BI can handle a wide assortment of data analytic objectives. It goes from consuming and modelling data to presenting it as dashboards and sharing the dashboards with the people who care about them. It has a focus on Usability : Power BI makes it simple to transform data into meaningful visualisations quickly. This is made possible by a drag and drop system of creating visuals, pick the visual, choose the data you want in it and boom you have an interactive way of looking at your data. You can have a report or dashboard going in minutes after you import your data. You can share your analysis and reporting easily: Once you have a report or dashboard that you are happy with it is simple to share internally and externally. business-agility.com

7 It s powerful (!): Power BI is an incredibly powerful tool for both modelling and visualising data. It has the same base as Power Query so if you have experience with M or DAX you can start making calculated columns, measures, and even shaping your data before you import it without having to learn an entirely new language. Accessibility and mobile-ready: Once you have a dashboard created you can access it from almost any device. The web app is great for displaying and editing reports from the desktop. The ios and Android apps allow you to use your reports on the go. For those who are after something with enough features to write a book on then there is the Microsoft Power BI Desktop, where you can model, transform, and visualize your data to your heart s content. 7 Search your data: The search function on Power BI allows you to ask questions of your data, rather than your data presenting you with lots of confusing information. Business Agility Consulting Ltd

8 How Power BI can get you out of Excel Hell 8 There are many things Power BI can do for you so you don t need to rely on spreadsheets so much. Unfortunately, you still need to somewhat use spreadsheets in order for Power BI to grab what it needs (then you re out of Excel Hell!) disclaimer aside, here are our top tips on how to bring Power BI to the table and get Excel to sit at the back! You can use Excel as a source for Power BI and embed it in SharePoint One of the many great things about Power BI is how easily other programs can plug into it. Instead of relying on that same old Excel spreadsheet every time, embed it into your SharePoint system and watch Power BI do all the rest. Power BI sits natively inside SharePoint sites and allows multiple users to access multiple sites, at the same time A great thing about SharePoint is the co-authoring functionality among Office 365 apps. Instead of playing tennis with several other editors of the document, you can make changes as well as seeing what changes other people are making to the document too. This feature may be simple, but it s brilliant for productivity boosting. Large workbooks do not work well across file shares they aren t scalable Large Excel files which are constantly being expanded can get more and more difficult to manage. If you need to share these Excel files you may encounter errors on the other end. The advantage of hooking your Excel workbook up to Power BI is that it s easily shareable on multiple devices too! business-agility.com

9 Latest visualisation technologies are loaded into Power BI Unlike Excel, Power BI is hugely visual. This is why it partners so well with Excel. You can input all your data into Excel as normal and get Power BI to pick it up and display it in a visually appealing dashboard which makes it great for presentations. Nobody wants to look at a spreadsheet in a presentation! 9 Power BI has mobile app integration Depending on your device, Excel can look awkward and clunky on mobile (especially larger, in-depth files). The beauty of Power BI (and the Cloud) means that devices of all kinds will be able to see Power BI s dashboard with ease. HTML5 responsive design in Power BI This means you re embedding BI reports inside of web pages instead of experiencing the problems of relying on client-side applications for this. Quick insights and machine learning analytics This is the adaptive interrogation of data using the latest Microsoft artificial intelligence and machine learning directly inside the application. This is part of Power BI it s built in; no add-ons needed! Machine learning and AI doesn t come with Excel. It means you gain further insight. Business Agility Consulting Ltd

10 I have Power BI what should I do first? 10 Define exactly WHAT you want to do Power BI runs on data. So, the first thing you need is a set of data to work with. This can come from Excel, SQL, Oracle or almost any other data source. What do you want Power BI to show you? Power BI is designed to make the data come straight to you, rather than you having to ask lots of questions and search all over the place to get to what you need. Start with the problem that needs to be solved Basically, you need to really understand your data before you can properly represent it using Power BI. Know what you want the data to show you and cut out everything you re not interested in. Don t be tempted to be shown everything, otherwise you re entering a new problem of drowning in data. Once you ve mastered what you need to see, the rest is fairly easy. Set the data source, then you can drag and drop the field onto the Power BI canvas and you start seeing your results instantly. Data sources aren t just Excel either. They can include social media statistics as well as common data sources such as SQL. business-agility.com

11 Best practice advice from us Power BI is designed with end users in mind. It is a very simple drag and drop surface so there is no issue with the end user interfering with the data. Because Power BI is a reporting tool, it pulls read only data from the database so there is no danger of the end user corrupting the data you are reporting on. We have some advice you may find useful; from security and governance to what pitfalls to avoid when it comes to Business Intelligence. 11 Security & Governance As with any Cloud software, security and governance need to be considered. When new processes involving data occur, new measures may be put into place to ensure the safety of said data. The best place to start here is to have a look at your organisation s data strategy and see if it resonates with your new data practices. What is the current data culture in your organisation? By having data results more freely available in an organisation you re therefore distributing actionable knowledge. The issue with this on both a security and governance aspect is that once people have access to this level of data all in one place, they can then make decisions based on it. It s really a double-edged sword, because this may be something you require in your organisation, however you need to be careful when considering where the permissions are. You can explore the idea of making members in a group workspace read-only with Power BI, which allows editing privileges only for admins of the group. If you have existing and strong data sources then it s best practice (in self-service BI) to reuse these data sources. As you know, Power BI is powered by many data sources, so if you have existing data that s already secure and well-governed, you ll be less likely to suffer security and governance issues down the road. Group workspaces in Power BI can also be very useful for security and governance. Datasets, reports, and Business Agility Consulting Ltd

12 dashboards in somebody s personal workspace are stranded should a user leave the company or change roles, thus requiring an administrator s assistance. 12 Beware of the pitfalls of BI (and know how to avoid them) Power BI can be quite fun to use once you ve got all of your (secured!) data sources together ready to plug into the system. However, there are many things that may hold you back from getting the best out of your new piece of kit. For example, if your end users aren t happy with how to use Power BI, or can t even see why they need it, then they re not likely to use it in the long term. We recommend you provide ongoing training so users become familiar and comfortable with the system. Make sure unaccustomed users are trained up and existing users are made aware of updates and changes. Take users feedback into account when you make updates too. Another common pitfall with many BI users includes multiple problems with data. From not replying on the data you collect to thinking you should be searching for your data all the time (when the data should actually be presenting itself to you!) We recommend you leverage the information you ve gathered and apply it to your own business models. Companies can then avert risk and make informed decisions to drive their business forward. We also recommend you make sure the data presented to you is relevant and obvious. Avoid using long way round strategies to access your data. As intriguing as Power BI is, wasting a lot of time trying to build graphs that you (or others you re presenting to) may not understand can be harmful to your Business Intelligence strategy. Our advice, ultimately, is seek advice and ensure you re trained. It s much, much less expensive to front-load your project/s with planning and guidance than it is to go it alone and try to correct your course mid-project. Remember, you want to maximise your investments, not minimise them! If you d like to know more about the Microsoft BI stack, please don t hesitate to get in touch with us. info@business-agility.com business-agility.com

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