Webinar replay: hands-on with Power View

Microsoft Power View is a useful add-on for Excel that helps you to visualize your data so that you can share and interpret information and present it to your customers. Here’s our webinar replay.

Power View is a part of the Microsoft BI family, which also contains Power Query, PowerPivot and Power Map, plus the new BI Q&A. Having used Power Query to collect all your data, you switch to PowerPivot to model the data. You then have three options for presenting the results: Power View, Power Map and the Google-like search system BI Q&A. In the webinar (click on the video to replay it), we took a closer look at the rich visual tools of Power View, which is suited to any dashboard and ideal for presenting conclusions based on the data you collect. On a side note, we should warn you that the Excel 2010 version looks slightly different from the 2013 version we used in the webinar. If you have any questions about this, feel free to contact us.

Maps

Use the ‘map’ option to see a map view without having to switch to the separate Power Map tool. Just go to ‘map view’ on the ribbon. You can add or remove data as necessary and use slicers to specify what information you are looking for and zoom in and out. The map view allows you to spot anomalies quickly and discover patterns at a glance.

Pie charts

Pie charts are ideal if you have limited options, but with Power View you can apply slicers to every slice. Use the hierarchy you created up front to keep your pie charts nice and tidy. Double-clicking on a section of the chart will reveal the information from the next level of the hierarchy. White lines will be added automatically to show you where to look for more data. You can combine bar charts and pie charts interactively.

Line charts

The use of line charts is pretty straightforward. But Power View allows you to add more visuals: images, logos, pictograms and other valuable extras are available in different styles, just by using the URL of an online image.

Bubble charts

Bubble charts or scatter charts are fun to play with and combine the visual information of a map and a line chart. It is easy to set the axes and you can look at data in more detail by clicking on a particular part of the chart. If you want to see how the bubbles evolve over time, you can click the ‘play’ button at the bottom of the chart and Power View will show the bubbles changing in size to indicate how their values will vary over time.