Introduction to Power View in SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services

This 75-minute video, the third module of our SQL BI training course, introduces the newest addition to the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform: Power View, which is part of SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services, which runs on SharePoint Server 2010. You will hear explanations of the fundamental concepts of Power View, such as Measures, and you will see all of its key features, including visualizations, in 17 hi-def demos, which you can also practice by using the free Microsoft-hosted labs for Power View. As with all our video content, you can use the very responsive “Jump to a chapter links”, allowing you to follow this video tutorial in your own way.

Power View is designed to be a highly intuitive end-user data exploration tool, suitable for creating self-service reports. The implicit nature of the way Power View works makes it possible to get to know it well quite quickly. Relationships are used automatically, so the user does not even need to know what they are, because they are supplied by the underlying Tabular Model. Similarly, filtering is implicit and automatic, allowing the user just to click on a data point to filter the remainder of the view, in addition to being able to use traditional filters. You will see this in the video, as well as you will learn how to source data from any BI Semantic Model: a PowerPivot workbook stored in SharePoint server, or a SSAS Tabular Model.

At the heart of Power View lie its easy-to-create, visually rich, and attractive data visualizations. You will learn how to get the data from columns in the model, and additionally, from implicitly or explicitly created Measures. Users are able to experiment with a variety of visualizations—easily switching between them—such as: Tables, Matrices, Cards, Tiles, Line Charts, Small Multiples, and the crowning glory of this tool, the animated Bubble Charts and Scatter Plots, also shown in this video. To help you further, we focus on the individual aspects of building a Bubble Chart, explaining its fields: Details field, Color field, which is useful for categorising data, bubble Size field, and the most important field for animations, the Play Axis field.

Ease of sharing a newly created report is paramount to users. First, you will see how to save a Power View RDLX file to a SharePoint Server PowerPivot Gallery, which is a great place for them, as it shows a detailed, page-by-page preview of the finished report. However, it is saving to Microsoft PowerPoint that can enable the fastest adoption of Power View in your organisation. PowerPoint is particularly suited for story-telling with data. Each PowerPoint slide is just another View in Power View, presenting yet another chapter in your story, and you will see how to do that in this video.

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