A tweet that got around twitter today reminded me of a great session I attended at Teched this year. It wasn’t about PowerPivot and it wasn’t even very technical. It was a session from Dan Bulos about Dashboard Design Best Practices. This is what the session was about:
How can you design an effective, useful, and appealing dashboard? Many articles and books focus on the mechanics of how to choose KPIs and the various formats available for displaying data. But even the most significant information can be lost if it is not displayed in a memorable way. Is the right format for critical values a grid, a graph, a gauge, maps, diagrams, or something else? What kinds of information are best displayed in a line vs. a bar graph? Where does a scorecard fit into all of this? Since they are not static, how dashboards interact and how they fit into a larger reporting environment offer a particular design challenge. Designing the navigation across the content on each dashboard page is critical to communicating the desired message. In this session, learn techniques for displaying a set of data in a dashboard for maximum impact and receive a framework for constructing dashboards from the various content types.
You can watch the entire presentation online at the teched online site.
One of the great slides in his presentation is the Chart suggestions chart that let’s you choose the chart type you need for the specific data you want to show:
Another great source about dashboard design is Stephen Few’s: Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
This weekend i returned from the MS BI conference. For me it has been a week of introductions and great conversations. Ofcourse meeting Rob Collie, Vidas Matelis, Marco Russo,Alberto Ferrari, Stacia Misner, and Andrew Brust for the first time. I also meet a lot of the great folks from the Microsoft AS en RS teams, talking to them was great and valuable.
As my fellow PowerPivot bloggers already blogged on the TechEd i am not going to repeat them 
What you didn’t see yet was something on the Pivot viewer. The Pivot viewer is a data visualization tool in silverlight, build on top of project Pivot.Currently it is just a experimental project and it takes a lot of work to attach the viewer to the data. But it sure looks great:
Fortunately the guys from MS have build a tool that can help in populating the data which will be available in the next 30 days.I hope to have an up and running sample very soon and make a blog post on it.
Thanks to a Chris Webb post i found this great blog post on a new MS research project called the Vedea Project.
Vedea is a prototype of a new experimental language for creating interactive infographics, data visualizations and computational art. It is designed to be accessible to people who are either new to programming or whose primary domain of expertise is something other than programming. We wanted to give those users a tool that they can use to realize their own vision and visualizations without having to engage skilled programmers, but have it be an environment that skilled programmers would not find limiting.
Ok what does this mean? Developers get great tools to create all kinds of visualizations from code
The Microsoft Visualization Language is built on .net 4.0’s new Dynamic Language Runtime. This gives us some important advantages over more traditional language implementations. Syntactically, the Vedea language looks a lot like C#. In its simplest form though, there are no class decorations – just a collection of functions. You can introduce classes if you want to do object-oriented programming, but they are not required and your topmost functions aren’t wrapped in any of the syntactic trappings of a class.
A piece of sample code that really got me excited:
myData = DataSet(“mydata.csv”);
currentYear := slider.Value + 1900;
bubbles := from row in myData
where row.Year :== currentYear
select new Circle()
{
X = row.Latitude,
Y = row.Longitude,
Radius = row.Population * scalingFactor,
Fill = BlackBodyPalette(1., 1., row.DeltaCarbon)
};
Scene[“USMap”].Add(bubbles);
This gives some pretty serious possibilities to create all kind of visualizations, this could be huge for BI developers with some kind of programming background (like me )
Read the entire post with more background and samples on the blog of Martin R. Calsyn of MS Science:
http://blogs.msdn.com/martinca/archive/2009/12/03/introducing-the-microsoft-visualization-language.aspx
Great article about Collaborative BI, and what the added value of getting your BI to masses is. It talks not only about PowerPivot but also Qlikview, Dynistics and Gartner.
A must read article for all you BI consultants in the field.
Read the entire article here: http://np.netpublicator.com/netpublication/n67773854 (pdf download available)
Dan English wrote a great blog post about Analysis Services (SSAS) Processing and Aggregations with SSIS:
So you created an SSAS database solution and have deployed it to a production environment. Now the data has accumulated and you need to take a look at moving to a incremental processing approach because you are either loading the data more regularly or the volume of data and processing does not meet your maintenance window anymore. So what do you do?
Read the solution Dan proposes at his blog: http://denglishbi.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!CD3E77E793DF6178!2101.entry Great in depth information !
Thanks to the great discussion some of us had on Twitter and the follow up on the PowerPivotPro blog we now know a PowerPivot API will be available in the future:
Patience guys. The API will be there.
We are just crunched on time to ship V1.0 of PowerPivot (remember – just 18 months from SQL 2008). But we have the full intention of exposing the API in full.
As MS BI consultant i’m really looking forward to PowerPivot but as developer with C# affinity i’m really excited on the prospect of the PowerPivot API. Think of all the potential projects you could do!
At the MS Excel team blog they have a great blog post where a member of the SQL Server Analysis Services team, Ashvini Sharma, will tell us about the PowerPivot.
The post gives a comprehensive look at the entire PowerPivot product, from front to back and names all components.
Read the entire article here: http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/10/22/introducing-powerpivot.aspx
The big question i have is, will the VertiPaq engine have an API where developers can build there own frontend on PowerPivot… with loading, connection and analysing sources in memory.
The SQL Server magazine has posted an interview with Microsofts Donald Farmer, a great interview. It explains how PowerPivot (called Gemini in the post) will affect the end users and what the reason for existence is for PowerPivot and how it will affect us BI consultants, even with some Real world samples. A great piece of info i was really waiting for.
A small excerpt:
SQL Server Magazine: How exactly are the services managed? And what does that mean for IT and end users?
Farmer: Let’s start with the story of one of the founding legends of Gemini: We were visiting a customer—a freight company. Somebody whispered in the IT manager’s ear, “You need to come and deal with a problem.” So the IT manager left for about an hour. The problem was that the cargo validation application had failed. What’s the cargo validation application? The IT manager had never heard of it. It turns out that this was a mission-critical application. Every cargo manager in the company was using it. The IT manager didn’t know it existed. Why not? It was an Excel spreadsheet. Somebody had built this application and shared it with other cargo managers. Soon every cargo manager in the organization had it. In fact, they wouldn’t ship a piece of cargo without it. And yet IT didn’t know it existed.
Gemini gives end users the power to build analytic applications, but when they deploy, share, and collaborate, IT can see what’s happening. IT will see the usage of any application that someone in the organization publishes. They’ll understand who published it, what the internals of that application are, what data sources it uses, and who else is using it. They’ll understand that it’s mission-critical. So IT understands that this is something they need to manage and control. But also maybe it’s something they need to secure, validate, and audit.
Read the entire article here: http://www.sqlmag.com/Articles/ArticleID/102613/pg/1/1.html
