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In this video we look at how Excel 2013 has matured as a tool for bringing in and combining
all your data sources from Twitter, Facebook, SharePoint, oData, Hadoop and structured databases.
Using Excel PowerPivot we are now able to combine all these sources to create very visual
management reports. We finally recap on what we have seen in our previous videos as well
as show the innovative Power View in action inside PowerPoint.
So what we're seeing here is another element of technology that we've seen already. You
can all see from the title it's about, 'Analytics for Twitter'. And if you can spot it's actually
Excel. And it's using all the technology that they've introduced over the years with the
graphs that are looking quite nice, and the slices, and Power Pivot and Power View, and
the latest in-memory technology that is about to come out.
This is capitalising on all this technology. Microsoft has introduced a way that you can
slice data so that you can filter graphs and filter all this information and it's now available
in Excel 2013. But Excel 2013 goes a lot further than that because yes you've got standard
graphs but what we've got here is Power View technology in Excel. So I don't need SharePoint
to look at Power View itself, and I don't need SharePoint or SQL to do in-memory technology
as we can see here I'm actually doing everything in Excel:
This is because PowerPivot is now part of the Excel Office Pro version, but there's
a lot more coming out at the moment -- there are a lot of other things here. You've got
standard data views, where you can bring data from SQL or Access, but there's new technology
coming out with Data Explorer where you could have other sources of data.
So I could bring in SharePoint lists natively; I don't know if anyone's played with SharePoint
lists before - you have to create the views no longer. You can now tap into the SharePoint
raw list data without creating views specifically for it because it understands the data structures.
You can do OData feeds; industry-wide known, Odata feeds; Even most of the Dynamics applications
have Odata feeds built in now so that's a very good way to bring in your data.
You can look at Azure marketplace, so I've brought in things such as temperatures across
the world. You can use that [Azure marketplace] to bring and do an analysis of information
including temperature and other UK, US Census information.
And there's the other technology which is synonymous with 'Big Data' which is Hadoop.
As well as In-memory you can actually capitalise on Hadoop. But you've got things like Facebook
as well -- so you can combine Facebook and Twitter feeds and actually do an analysis.
Also the sequel [SQL] and structured data has been enhanced from Oracle to MySQL, to
any of these technologies really. And you can bring in all the traditional Excel, XML
and CSV.
We mentioned Power Pivot where you can actually build your own in-memory paths. So we can
actually have a look at how the twitter information is built up, so in fact the Twitter information
is brought in using an API, and then constructed into an in-memory layout that can then be
brought onto Power View itself.
But now we are starting to have a lot more technologies -- this is in essence capitalising
on sequel [SQL], the first 3 elements they are data preparation you don't need sequel
[SQL] but for the rest of it: data-modelling and all the Accuracy and Validation you need
sequel [SQL] in the background. All you need is to tap into an instance, but it will allow
you to do things such as forecasting, it will allow you to do classifying -- In fact, when
you have data you can do things such as in-basket analysis - And this is all the technology
that is coming directly [to Excel], Microsoft is also working on more geo-graphic analysis.
As this goes on... So this is information through Excel; this is quite powerful. You
just buy a license of Microsoft Office.
What I'm going to do next is actually show you not just the technology in-memory that
we've seen already; I'm going to show you something quite interesting really as to how
this works through PowerPoint itself. We've seen Power View galleries in SharePoint
2010, very powerful. Different slices of my business, we've seen how I can change that
information myself and very, very quickly create my own views.
How that information can slice across the different elements of my business and I can
monitor the whole thing from Power View itself. I can do quick investigations, save them,
send them out. And geomapping comes out of the box.
We can then do data-mash ups with other UK Census data as I've shown previously; and
I can make it a little bit cleaner by having a look at the data. This is all in-memory,
all we've seen is both cubed and PowerPivot in-memory. So this can be brought into Excel
itself.
You don't need SharePoint to actually surface this information, you can use Excel by itself
to do it. And we have a lot clearer pictures these days, and what we have here is the data
mash-up of UK census data with your own corporate data and how we can observe it through time.
I can observer Christmas periods or seasonality and how we can see the pickup of certain marketing
events actually make a difference to our business. But I did say that I would show you PowerPoint,
I wasn't making a mistake there, it is PowerPoint; so it's Power View in PowerPoint. And if you
can spot, we've got an 'interact' button here. That is because we've created PowerView in
SharePoint and I would typically go through SharePoint to access it. But here, let's say
I've got a presentation and I want to show what's going on with the business. So what
we have here is, it's made a direct connection, made a call to the query and brought back
that query. So what I'm looking at here is the actual data live, and I do mean live.
So if I click on a category, I can actually see it again run a query, go back to the database,
bring back the information, and do everything I would have done through SharePoint and Power
View.
So I've now got full drill-down, full data, in PowerPoint itself. That's quite a powerful
feature really, and the ability to go into a board meeting, being able to actually look
at the data live. And again, the underlying technology, let's explain this: Power View
is the User Interface -- it's allows you to work as an end--user, SharePoint is where
you share things -- whether it be your data or the Power Views themselves and sequel [SQL]
is where you will build your data warehouse, your data-mart. And this is where we come
in to make sure that you have a data mart that will allow you to use these features.
But the rest of it really, we train you and we show you. I mean as I always say you need
to begin with this -- you need to put something in place in order to do that. So start with
a very simple data-mart and look at how you can surface this information... Do not get
concerned with that you need to have a very complex view in order to achieve what you've
seen. You know, there we've got cells, I was able to quickly augment that with external
big data like UK census. And finally make sure that you have the right questions and
you can put the right emphasis on influencing what people are asking and how they're working
with it. Computers are very good at giving us the answers, you can see here I could find
my own answers within a few minutes. But really, you need to have those questions of what your
business is looking for. Then simply contact an expert in Microsoft Technologies, and we'd
be able to help.