I am delighted to welcome Carmel Gunn from Prodata SQL Centre of Excellence in Dublin, company well-known in Ireland, and around the world in the SQL community for its BI expertise. Carmel works with large enterprises as a Data Management Specialist. Carmel is our newest author, and she has kindly agreed to record Excel BI for Enterprises online video training, focusing on the neglected aspect of corporate BI: the user. She teaches how to use Excel to explore, analyse, and report data insights contained in powerful corporate BI models, usually provided by an IT department, such as multidimensional OLAP cubes, tabular models, or models created with Power Pivot.

Start by watching her free! How to Make Enterprise Dashboards in Excel video, in which she carefully shows how to create a professional-looking, fully functional dashboard, in under 30 minutes. Best of all, towards the end of that video, Carmel shows a somewhat-hidden, but a very important feature of Excel 2013 and SharePoint 2013, which makes it possible to enable any part of your new dashboard to work well on mobile devices, including iPads, Surface etc.

If you would like to learn about the fundamental Excel BI concepts, such as: measures, dimensions, attributes and hierarchies, listen to her no-nonsense explanations aimed at BI users in the Excel BI: Basic Concepts video, which is also designed to help you become an adept user of Excel Pivot Table functionality. I admit that I have learned plenty from Carmel while working with her. There are good few nifty little option, and right-click menus, that make a difference between slugging it in Excel and getting your work done in no time at all.

That second module is only available to Full Access Members. If you are thinking of joining, please join for a whole year, as Carmel will be adding new videos regularly—the next one, about filtering and selecting data, is coming in a month.

Finally, if you are an advanced user, perhaps learning DAX with Albeto and Marco, or MDX with Chris, and if you know all of those Excel techniques, please: think of the users—for whom you are building your great models. If those users are going to benefit from your work, they need to know how to make good use of Excel BI features—let them know about this new training course, as I am sure a happy BI user will help you get ahead with your own work.