In many businesses, where IT is struggling to keep up with businesses data demands, rifts are developing between business users and IT. Rightly or wrongly more business users are assuming ownership of data and Business Intelligence and creating their own...
Indexes in SQL Server make queries run faster and more efficiently. With the size of databases increasing almost exponentially, being able to return results quickly with minimal stress on the underlying server is crucial. This tutorial includes a practical demonstration of performance...
This is the second of 3 tutorials on creating scorecards using Tibco Spotfire Silver. In this tutorial I cover Connecting to multiple data sources Refreshing data Creating "drill through" visualisations Calculated fields and custom expressions Hierarchies that roll data up from months through to years Text...
Visualization-based data discovery tools may account for less than 5 % of the Business Intelligence (BI) Market, but they are fighting above their weight in terms of profile. In 2011, Gartner placed Visualisation at the peak of the BI Hype...
An introductory tutorial on how to create cloud based dashboards that can be viewed online through browsers and on mobile devices such as Ipads. The demonstration uses the free version of Tibco Spotfire Silver. The sample data file used...
A SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) subreport is a report created inside a main report. The main report acts as a container for one or more related subreports. The main report and subreport are linked via parameters. This enables related...
Introduction to adding Grouping and Drill Down functionality to simple Tabular Reports in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). This simple two-step process allows you to compress flat reports and make it easier to view large amounts of data. When used...
Here is a simple demonstration of how to add totals and subtotals to a report within SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Adding totals and subtotals is simple, but not very intuitive. So I hope this demo helps.
In many reporting situations users need to restrict the data visible in a report. For example filtering a master report with a drop-down list box so that only information for a specific month or product is shown. This video demonstrates...
This demonstration uses Business intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) to launch the SQL Server Reporting Services wizard and create a report through a series of simple steps. The demonstration involves 1) creating a new data source (shared in this case)...
This video post covers how to create a Google Motion Chart in a Google Spreadsheet and then publish it as a gadget to an iGoogle dashboard. The video also covers 1) What are Motion Charts? 2) Why use them? 3)...
The Visio Data Mining Add In for Excel provides a very flexible template to visualize & format data mining models produced in the Excel Data Mining Addin. This demonstration covers 4 topics - 1) what is the Microsoft Visio Data...
This video blog post demonstrates how to use Excel data tables & the OFFSET function to create graphs & data tables that dynamically / automatically update when the underlying data changes. Amazon.com Widgets
This video blog post demonstrates how to build a scorecard in Excel 2010 using the Powerpivot addin. It also outlines the advantages of using Excel 2010 Powerpivots to build scorecards. This includes a) Data compression b) Very fast "slicing of...
In this post I demonstrate how to update data in Powerpivots. Updates are different from a data refresh as updates incorporate new columns of data- so the structure of the underlying excel table changes. A standard data refresh wouldn't pull...
Excel 2010 Powerpivots are great tool to report on and slice and dice data. Often underlying data sources changes and the Powerpivots need updating. An example might be customer segmentation changing. A data refresh is used when now new columns of...
The Powerpivot addin in Excel 2010 makes it easy to build reports with incredibly large volumes of underlying data data. OLAP cube technology from SQL server is now included within Excel 2010 with the Powerpivot addin. This means it now...