Sunday, April 2, 2017

BI capabilities in Excel and Office 365

BI capabilities in Excel and Office 365

Note:  The information in this article applies to Excel 2013 and SharePoint Online in Office 365 Enterprise. If you're looking for information about Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2013 (on premises), see Business intelligence in Excel and Excel Services (SharePoint Server). Business intelligence capabilities are not supported in Office 365 operated by 21Vianet.

Business intelligence (BI) is essentially the set of tools and processes that people use to gather data, turn it into meaningful information, and then make better decisions. In Office 365 Enterprise, you have BI capabilities available in Excel and SharePoint Online. These services enable you to gather data, visualize data, and share information with people in your organization across multiple devices.

What do you want to do?

Use Excel to gather and visualize data

Step 1: Get data

Step 2: Visualize data

Step 3: Add filters

Step 4: Add advanced analytic capabilities

Use SharePoint Online to share and view workbooks

Use Power BI to access more BI capabilities in the cloud

Use Excel to gather and visualize data

In just a few simple steps, you can create charts and tables in Excel.

Example of an Excel Services dashboard

Step 1: Get data

In Excel, you have lots of options to get and organize data:

Step 2: Visualize data

Once you have data in Excel, you can easily create reports:

Step 3: Add filters

You can add filters, such as slicers and timeline controls to worksheets to make it easier to focus on more specific information.

Step 4: Add advanced analytic capabilities

When you're ready, you can add more advanced capabilities to your workbooks. For example, you can create calculated items in Excel. These include:

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Use SharePoint Online to share and view workbooks

If your organization is using team sites, you're using SharePoint Online, which gives you lots of options to share workbooks. You can specify Browser View Options that determine how your workbook will be displayed.

You can display workbooks in gallery view like this, where one item at a time is featured in the center of the screen:

Sample workbook displayed in gallery view

You can display workbooks in worksheet view, like this, where a whole worksheet is displayed in the browser:

Sample workbook displayed in worksheet view

When a workbook has been uploaded to a library in SharePoint Online, you and others can easily view and interact with the workbook in a browser window.

Use Power BI for more BI capabilities in the cloud

Power BI gives you even more BI capabilities than what you get in Excel and SharePoint Online. Power BI offers a robust, self-service BI solution in the cloud.

For more information, see Power BI.

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