Category: Self-service BI

BI Projects, Business Analytics, Copilot, Data Agents, Dimensional Modeling, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, Self-service BI, Semantic Models

Power BI Copilot, Data Agent Optimization & Performance

Paul Turley

Amid the AI frenzy, there is a lot of conversation about how business users will use agentic chat to answer business questions rather than interactive, dashboard-style reports. Is there truly a shift in the industry, and is agentic analytics going to change the way most business users consume data?

Just how viable is the whole “chat with your data” option, and is it really a replacement for conventional reporting? I recently heard a VP-level leader at a large consulting firm say something to the effect of “we need to stop investing in dashboard-building skills and focus on creating AI-driven data analysis solutions for our consulting customers.” I’m paraphrasing from memory, but that was the sentiment. Are all business leaders across the industry giving up their dashboards, interactive visual reports and scorecards in exchange for AI chat? No. Of course they aren’t — but conversational analysis is a new way to consume business data.

BI Projects, Gartner, Microsoft BI Platform, MVP Community, Paginated Reports, PASS, Power BI, Power Query, Self-service BI, SSAS Design, Tabular Models

DevOps & CI/CD for Power BI

Paul Turley

DevOps isn’t difficult to implement for small and medium-scale projects, and simple things like managing version control in a code repository can save hours of lost time. Organization who are accustomed to managing large application development initiatives might expect to have a fully automated build and deployment process in concert with an Agile delivery process, managed with specialized tools like Jira, GitHub and Azure DevOps.

Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, BI Industry, Business Analytics, Dimensional Modeling, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, Power Query, Self-service BI, SQL Server, Tabular Models

Getting Data Into Shape for Reporting with Power BI

Paul Turley

Even for small, informal BI projects, shaping the data into a dimensional model alleviates complexity, speeds up slow calculations and reduces the data model storage size. I conclude this post by reviewing seven data architectures and the data shaping methods with different degrees of scale.

BI Industry, BI Projects, Microsoft BI Platform, Power Query, Self-service BI

Doing Power BI the Right Way

Paul Turley

This is an introduction to a series of posts and pages that will provide a comprehensive set of best practices for successful Power BI solutions. In previous posts. Let’s start with a simplified flowchart and condensed decision tree. This first whiteboard drawing is the first half of the Power BI design process, ending with the data model, before measures, visualization and solution delivery. There is a lot more but I think this is a good starting point. Let’s start the conversation here and then I will enhance this post with a more complete list of topics.

BI Industry, BI Projects, Power BI, Self-service BI

How to Assign Pro Licenses to a Power BI Tenant

Paul Turley

This is a question that comes up all the time. Power BI licensing is not complicated but a common challenge is that the person who sets up a new Power BI subscription and tenant within an organization is often not the same person who manages Office 365 or Azure service licensing for the organization. I’ve consulted on projects for several organizations where folks just didn’t know who to talk to or how to proceed after testing the water with Power BI. After setting up a new subscription, IT professionals and business data analysist often don’t know how to license Power BI for company use and share reports and datasets with others in the organization.
This post will show you how licenses are assigned to users and, more importantly, what to request from your support desk or administrators who may be unfamiliar with Power BI and Office 365 user licensing. Keep reading for background information about why this is important and necessary.

BI Industry, Business Analytics, Power BI, Power Query, Self-service BI, SolidQ

Mastering Power Query in a Day – Full-day training in Seattle

Paul Turley

Following the Power BI World Tour, Seattle event on Oct 30, please join me for a full-day of deep learning. …

BI Industry, BI Projects, Business Analytics, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, Self-service BI, SQL Saturday

Keeping Up with Power BI – A Never Ending Story

Paul Turley

This first week of the new year has been a lot of housecleaning for me (literally and figuratively…  my office…

BI Industry, Business Analytics, Microsoft BI Platform, PASS, Power BI, PowerShell, Self-service BI

Spontaneous Interviews at PASS Summit 2017

Paul Turley

Conversations with Julie Koesmarno, Olivier Matrat, Aaron Nelson, Seth Bauer and Robert Bruckner captured in video interviews below… Continuing my…