I don’t like writing reviews of books or products here on my blog for a couple of reasons, the main one being that I don’t usually have the time to read/test/understand something properly so I can write a thorough review. That said I do get sent a lot of free books and evaluation licences for products that deserve a wider audience, so I thought I would write a post rounding up some of them along with a few thoughts of my own.
Custom Visuals
One of the most interesting questions related to Power BI is whether third-party software companies will be able to build businesses selling extensions to it. The most obvious way that Power BI can be extended is through custom visuals and there are several companies that have paid-for (as opposed to free) custom visuals. Zebra BI is one such company and I’ve been really impressed by what they have produced for visualising financial data:
I also saw recently that OKViz (part of the Marco and Alberto/SQLBI family) now have a paid-for version of their excellent Smart Filter visual with some premium features – see here for more details; similarly new features in Klaus Birringer’s Ultimate Waterfall and Ultimate Decomposition Tree visuals are only available in the paid version.
I know many Power BI users who use custom visuals have suffered with various bugs and limitations in functionality over the past few users, and I think buying commercial custom visuals rather than relying on free equivalents is one way of dealing with reliability and support problems. It’s certainly in Microsoft’s interests to have a thriving partner community in this space given that flashy visuals are a major selling point of the product. But will Power BI users want to pay for visuals when so much is available out of the box for free, especially when the cost of the visuals seems relatively high when compared to the overall cost of Power BI? I guess we’ll see.
Custom Connectors
A lot of what I’ve just said about custom visuals also applies to custom connectors, although custom connectors are a lot less mature (at the time of writing, support for custom connectors in the on-premises gateway is still in preview). However I was pleased to see this announcement from CData software that they now have over 100 custom connectors available for Power BI. It looks like what they have done is wrapped their existing ODBC providers, and as a result some of their connectors are for sources that are already available in Power BI, but even so there are a lot of new data sources here.
Incidentally, I got very, very excited when I realised that the CData connectors for Excel and Excel Online supported DirectQuery mode as well as import mode. Why, I hear you ask? Well, just think about a planning/budgeting solution where users can enter data into an Excel spreadsheet and when the numbers change in Excel, the numbers change in Power BI too; think also how this could work with Composite Models. I tried this with CData’s Excel on-premises connector and unfortunately it returned errors when the source Excel worksheet was open; I did get it to work with the Excel Online connector but it was painfully slow, even with a small amount of data. If I can get it to work better (and I may be missing some optimisations within the connector) I’ll blog about it.
Books
One of the few Power BI-related books that have been published recently is Phil Seamark’s “Beginning DAX with Power BI”. He was kind enough to send me a review copy; it’s a good introduction to the subject and I particularly like the way he introduces DAX variables early one. Definitely worth a look if you’re just starting to learn DAX.
I was also sent a copy of a slightly older book, David Parker’s “Mastering Data Visualization with Visio 2016”. David knows pretty much all there is to know about using Visio for BI (his blog is great) and while this book doesn’t cover the most exciting new development in this area – the Visio custom visual for Power BI – if you want to learn all the advanced features of Visio that you could take advantage of in Power BI then this is the book to get.
Other Products
I’ve been a big fan of SentryOne’s SSAS monitoring tool, BI Sentry, for years now but up until recently it only supported SSAS Multidimensional. It now supports SSAS Tabular too (details here), and it looks like SentryOne have done a great job of adapting it to the specific needs of the Tabular engine. I always advise my SSAS customers to invest in some kind of monitoring solution because it makes the job of detecting and solving issues like poor query performance so much easier, and to be honest BI Sentry is better than anything you would be able to build yourself.
Moving onto Power BI, if you need to generate documentation for your Power BI datasets and reports check out Power BI Documenter; the August release looks like it has some cool new features. Alternatively the latest release of Power BI Helper also allows you to generate documentation as well as lots of other useful stuff.
Something that hasn’t been properly released yet, but will be incredibly useful when it is, is MAQ Software’s Application Lifecycle Management Toolkit for Power BI. Closely related to BISM Normalizer, it will allow you to compare two Power BI datasets, merge changes, deploy only parts of a dataset (for example individual measures), and deploy to multiple datasets – all of which are things Power BI developers have been crying out for.
Last of all, the guys at DevScope also have a new(ish) product out, Power BI Robots, which automatically takes screenshots of Power BI reports and dashboards and can deliver them to various destinations such as email address and SharePoint. I haven’t looked at it yet but it seems like it could have a lot of interesting uses.
That ALM toolkit from MAQ looks like it will be really useful. Cant wait to see what is possible with ti
Great article, thanks, I’m always on the lookout for Power BI power-ups, and it’s one thing I don’t think the Microsoft product team has been great about publicizing. My small contribution: I’ve been using Power BI Robots for a few months now and absolutely LOVE it. As you mentioned it lets you email out static screenshots of reports to whomever, whenever. The best part of it is that recipients needn’t log in to Power BI to get a basic view of their report info. So think of all the non-power users at a company, who don’t want to have to remember another login or how to use another tool, even one as simple as Power BI. (Think heads of sales and other top executives.) With Robots you just deliver them data, the way they’re used to getting it (in email). It’s fantastic. (Plus recipients don’t even need Power BI licenses.) To me it’s literally been the missing link on making Power BI take off at my company. And for the record, I have absolutely nothing to do with the publisher of Robots, I’m just a happy customer.