I see data visualizations... Power BI, Power Map and Power Q&A [Oh my]

SQL Server Blog - Data Visualizations

A couple of weeks back was a really exciting time for us. Less than a year after we released Office 365 for Businesses, we announced the general availability of Power BI for Office 365. You may have read previous blog articles by Quentin Clark on “Making Big Data Work for Everyone” and Kamal Hathi on “Simplifying Business Intelligence through Power BI for Office 365”. In this article, we’ll outline how we think about visualizations.

Why Visualizations Matter

While a list of items is great for entering or auditing data, data visualizations are a great way to distill information to what matters most that is understandable quickly.

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Visualizations in Productivity Apps

We have the privilege of having the largest community of users of productivity applications in the world. Thanks...

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Faster Creation of Visualizations

Excel 2007 introduced the ability to set the style of a chart with one click and leverage richer graphics such as shadows, anti-aliased lines, and transparency.

Office 2013 was one of our most ground-breaking releases.

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Richer Interactivity

Part of my role at Microsoft involves presenting on various topics to stakeholders, and increasingly most of these include data visualizations. Only a few years back, I remember ...

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Visualizations on All Data

In addition, both data volumes and the types of data customers want to visualize have expanded as well.

Excel 2013 also introduced the Data Model, opening the door for workbooks that contained significantly larger datasets than before, with richer way to express business logic directly within the workbook.

Increasingly, we have access to geospatial data, and recently introduced Power Map brings new 3D visualization tool for mapping, exploring, and interacting with geographical and temporal data to Excel, enabling people to discover and share new insights such as trends, patterns, and outliers in their data over time...

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We are very excited to have introduced Power Q&A as part of the Power BI launch. This innovative experience makes it even easier to understand your data by providing a natural language experience that interprets your question and immediately serves up the correct answer on the fly in the form of an interactive chart or graph. These visualizations change dynamically as you modify the question, creating a truly interactive experience with your data.

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Visualizations Everywhere

As customers are creating insights and sharing them, we have also invested in ensuring SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 provide full fidelity rendering as the desktop client so their products remain beautiful wherever it’s consumed.

What’s Next?

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The Power Q&A looks interesting. I'd love to be able to provide that kind of thing in my apps. But lets see how it plays out over a version or two...

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Going with the GeoFlow for Excel 2013... Free 3D visualization add-in for mapping, exploring, and interacting with geographical/temporal data