Data Visualization is an essential aspect of today’s digital era. It provides businesses with a clear and quick understanding of all their data. Thanks to graphical representations, businesses can now visualize large volumes of data seamlessly in a coherent and understandable way, which in turn helps them comprehend the information and draw insights and conclusions from it.
Visualization helps to deliver the information from data in a more understandable way. This article will help you understand Power BI Variants, Excel, Analyze in Excel, Power View Excel, and methods to analyze data from Power BI in Excel and furthermore to directly query the data sources to perform analytics and create the visualization.
Table of Contents
Introduction to Power BI
Power BI is a visualization tool offered by Microsoft to manage and analyze data from different sources and create appealing visualization to provide insights from data.
Power BI pulls the data from sources and turns them into powerful insights by processing and analyzing it. It helps users to understand what’s happening with their organization and campaigns.
Variants of Power BI
- A window-based Desktop application known as Power BI Desktop
- Online Software as a Service (SaaS) known as Power BI Service
- Mobile Version is known as Power BI apps
Power BI is built on the Microsoft Excel framework, and hence users find it very easy to migrate from Excel to Power BI. However, the latter is far more potent than its spreadsheet counterpart.
What is Power View Excel?
Power View is a powerful visualization tool that is available in Microsoft Excel that allows users to create graphs charts and reports. It makes it easier for businesses to create reports dashboards that can be shared with stakeholders, managers, and other team members on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Power View Excel is considered one of the best offline Reporting Tool and delivers good performance when combined with Excel Formulae, Pivot Tables, and other functions that make the Data Analysis a seamless process. It comes with Analytical tools capable of performing statistical predictions and forecasting.
How to Enable Power View under Microsoft Excel?
Now that you have understood about Power View Excel. In this section, you go through the steps to enable Power View under Microsoft Excel. First, you need to enable the Power View tool under Microsoft Excel settings.
- Go to the File Menu at the top left corner and select the Options button.
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- A new window will pop up named Excel Options that have many Excel configurations.
- Here, click on the Add-ins option from the navigation menu.
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- In the Add-ins, scroll down to the end, and here you will find the section named Manage that contains all the Excel Add-ins options.
- From the drop-down menu, select the COM Add-ins option, then click on the Go button.
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- A new pop-up window will open named COM Add-ins. Here select the Microsoft Power View for Excel option and then click on the Ok button.
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- It will enable the Power View in Microsoft Excel and you can find the Power View Excel option under the Insert tab.
Features of Power BI
Power BI is an extension to Excel by having more power and analytical muscle to perform analysis. Some of the key features of Power BI are as below:
- Power BI is a powerful business intelligence tool that can ingest the data, analyze them and create a visualization to provide better insights about operations and performances.
- Power BI can quickly process vast volumes of data.
- Power BI has exceptional Machine Learning libraries that help users to perform predictive analytics.
- Power BI contains pre-built templates that allow businesses to create an effective dashboard for in-depth analysis of their data.
- Power BI is also available in the cloud so that users can access the functionality everywhere.
- Power BI allows users to set up alerts to keep users up to date with essential metrics and measurements.
- Power BI has a user-friendly interface and allows users to navigate smoothly.
- Power BI can integrate with other platforms like Office 365, Spark, Hadoop, GA, Salesforce, MailChimp, and many more.
Introduction to Microsoft Excel
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Microsoft Excel was the bedrock of data analysis before technology brought forth more comprehensive tools that made the task of data analysis a lot easier. Microsoft Excel houses a large number of functionalities and along with its ease of use, it has been an integral tool for all manners of education, business, finance, and research to name a few areas. Microsoft Excel continues to be a popular data analysis tool to organize and present large amounts of data.
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Pre-Requisites
- Microsoft Excel installation 2010 SP1 or later.
- Power BI setup
- Basic understanding of Data and Excel methods to apply.
Setting Up Analyze in Excel Tool
Analyze in Excel is a feature in Power BI that helps bring the data to excel and use Excel features like Charts, PivotTables, etc., to analyze. Before using this feature, we have to download and install it from Power BI.
Set Up Power View Excel: Step 1
To download Analyze in Excel, Sign into Power BI.
Set Up Power View Excel: Step 2
Navigate to more options, top three horizontal dots, click on download and select Analyze for Excel.
Set Up Power View Excel: Step 3
Click on download, and it will download the MSI installer based on the Excel version installed on your machine.
Image Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/media/service-analyze-in-excel/analyze-excel-00a.png
Set Up Power View Excel: Step 4
After the download completes, execute the MSI installer to install Analyze in Excel.
Image Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/media/service-analyze-in-excel/analyze-excel-05.png
Set Up Power View Excel: Step 5
Once the installation is completed, we can select the report to Analyze the Excel.
Connect to Data in Power BI
Now that you have to Analyze in the Excel plugin, you can connect any data sources to visualize them in Excel. Follow the detailed step by step guide:
Connect Power View Excel: Step 1
Sign in to Power BI.
Connect Power View Excel: Step 2
Navigate to the dataset that you want to analyze in Excel.
Connect Power View Excel: Step 3
Select the More options menu (three vertical dots) against the dataset.
Connect Power View Excel: Step 4
Select Analyze in Excel from the menu items that appear.
Image Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/media/service-analyze-in-excel/analyze-excel-06.png
Connect Power View Excel: Step 5
Once you click “Analyze in Excel”, the Power BI service will create an Excel file compatible with Analyze in Excel and downloads it to your local machine.
Image Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/media/service-analyze-in-excel/analyze-in-excel-download-xlsx.png
Connect Power View Excel: Step 6
Once the file is downloaded, open the file, and you’re ready to use Excel Features.
Use Excel to Analyze the Data
Use Power View Excel: Step 1
Open the downloaded file into Excel and enable the Editing Content option. Excel opens an empty Pivot table with the fields from the dataset.
Image Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/media/service-analyze-in-excel/analyze-in-excel-connected.png
Use Power View Excel: Step 2
The Excel uses OLAP connection with Power BI, and hence whatever query we execute on Excel, it runs them in Power BI and returns the result.
Use Power View Excel: Step 3
Once you have performed the analysis, you can save the workbook and share it with other Power BI users in your organization.
Use Power View Excel: Step 4
One important aspect is you cannot use this Excel workbook to publish it back to Power BI.
Conclusion
In this article you learned about Power BI Variants, Excel, Analyze in Excel, Power View Excel, and methods to analyze data from Power BI in Excel and furthermore to directly query the data sources to perform analytics and create the visualization.
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Share your experience of learning about Power View Excel. Tell us in the comments below!