November 13, Excel Features that Developers Should Know (Hosted by SQL PASS BA VC) The Baker’s Dozen Business Intelligence 13 SQL Server / Business Intelligence Productivity Tips Kevin S. Goff Microsoft SQL Server MVP

Kevin S. Goff – Brief BIO Developer/architect since 1987 / Microsoft SQL Server MVP Columnist for CoDe Magazine since 2004, “The Baker’s Dozen” Productivity Series”, 13 tips on a SQL/BI topic Wrote a book, collaborated on a 2 nd book Frequent speaker for SQL Server community events and SQL Live!360 Conferences My site/blog: (includes SQL/BI webcasts) Releasing some SQL/BI video courseware in Excel Features for Developers

Why Excel? Business Users rely on Excel for all sorts of Custom Reporting - good application developers should have general awareness of “how” people are using the data Sometimes Excel is a good prototyping tool for reporting, and even for sanity-checking data Sometimes developers even use for their own personal projects! 313 Excel Features for Developers Today’s Topic

1.What-If/Goal Seeking 2.VLOOKUP 3.Named Ranges 4.Basic Pivot Tables against OLTP/OLAP Data Sources 5.Pivot Table Options (Filters, Calculations, Visual Slicers) 6.Pivot Charts and Sparklines 7.Dynamic Coloring and Macros 8.Power Pivot 9.Power Pivot KPIs and DAX 10.Power View 11.MDX 12.A special Pivot Chart 13.Recommended Reading 4 Topics for today 13 Excel Features for Developers

5 1-What-If/Goal Seeking 13 Excel Features for Developers If I scored above 85 on the first three tests…. What is the lowest score I can get on the fourth test and still have an 85 average overall? Back to TOC

6 1-What-If/Goal Seeking 13 Excel Features for Developers Want a loan for 20K Want to pay back in 5 years We can afford $400 a month What interest rate should we look for? Set payment function first, then do a goal seek on the payment, to see how it changes the rate Back to TOC

7 2-VLOOKUP 13 Excel Features for Developers VLOOKUP Specify: –The value we want to lookup up –The table range –The index column for the return value –Whether it’s an exact or approximate match Back to TOC

8 3-Named Ranges 13 Excel Features for Developers Lock References you want to freeze with the $, or create a named cell Range Don’t use regular range, copy/paste won’t freeze absolute cell references Lock References you want to freeze with the $, or create a named cell Range Back to TOC

1.Can create Pivot Tables or Pivot Charts Against: 1.Relational Databases or Views 2.OLAP Cubes 2.“All the data” stays in the source, only the results of a query come into the Pivot Table or Pivot Chart 3.For years, the standard way to create analytics in Excel against data 4.(We’ll see Power Pivot and how that changes things) 9 4-Basic Pivot Tables against data sources 13 Excel Features for Developers Back to TOC

10 5-Pivot Table Options 13 Excel Features for Developers Slices (Visual Filters) We can redefine Reseller Sales as a % of the Row Parent Can sort each level by $$$ Back to TOC

11 5-Pivot Table Options 13 Excel Features for Developers Can implement a “top 5 and all other” manually, behind the scenes, with a copy of the first five rows, and then a formula: =GETPIVOTDATA(A4, "Total") - SUM(F4:F8) Back to TOC

12 6-Pivot Charts and Sparklines 13 Excel Features for Developers Visual Sparkline Dynamic coloring for high month and low month for each country. Build as a macro for one row and then re-execute Back to TOC

13 7-Dynamic Coloring and Macros 13 Excel Features for Developers Start recording a macro Set Dynamic Conditional Formatting from the Home Menu dropdown Stop recording the macro Do it for both Top 1 and Bottom 1, and then concatenate one macro into the other Back to TOC

14 8-Power Pivot 13 Excel Features for Developers Compressed Star Schema Model “in the basement” of the Excel Sheet 1.Users can point Excel to database content 2.Can create the equivalent of a “mini-cube”, compressed using xVelocity compression 3.The Power Pivot Data Model lives “inside” the Excel Sheet 4.Users can create many Pivot Tables or Pivot Charts off the Model 5.Users can also create Power View report visualizations off the data model Back to TOC

15 8-Power Pivot 13 Excel Features for Developers Model can come from physical relational tables or database views Must create relationships if source was views Can implement dimensional hierarchies This is somewhat like building SSAS OLAP cubes, except it doesn’t support advanced fact/dimension relationships Back to TOC

16 8-Power Pivot 13 Excel Features for Developers KPI scorecards in Excel, similar to other SharePoint dashboarding tools Garrett’s sales as % of Quota was 80.18%. That’s “OK”, so status is yellow. But his sales one year ago was 85.13% of quota – so his % of quota is trending down, and that’s not good The % of Quota last year represents a DAX formula to express the % of quota for “same time period last year” User can look at sales and quotas by Employee for a year or a quarter Back to TOC

17 8-Power Pivot 13 Excel Features for Developers Monthly Sales + 12 month moving average, plotted as a line chart (Requires a set of DAX formulas) Back to TOC

18 9-Power Pivot KPIs and DAX 13 Excel Features for Developers DAX formula to express % of Quota in terms of one year ago Calculate a ratio on the fly: not too bad Express in terms of a year ago: arguably a bit more involved Back to TOC

19 9-Power Pivot KPIs and DAX 13 Excel Features for Developers More complicated DAX code to calculate a Moving Average Must determine, for any one month, the 12 month range (start month and end month of range) Must average the internet sales over the span of that range DAX is sometimes advertised as “easier” than the MDX language used in SSAS/OLAP applications, but sometimes DAX can be just as involved Back to TOC

20 10-Power View 13 Excel Features for Developers Report Visualization Tool for Power Users Great for storyboard-type reporting, “face- style” reporting where a page or subset of a page tells a story Not intended for full blown detail reports Not as much developer functionality as Reporting Services Back to TOC

10: Power View 13 Excel Features for Developers21 Power View visualization against the Power Pivot Data Model User can filter on Country – State Province Scatter chart plotting city observations of Sales revenue and # of orders Can use year as “Play axis” to show that while Beaverton is top city in Oregon across all years, it wasn’t top city in 2007 TOC Back to TOC

10: Power View 13 Excel Features for Developers22 We can even select a single city and plot the progression of annual sales for a city over time While this has nice interactive features, advanced users might want to show a linear regression line, and also the correlation coefficient (impact of order count on sales) Here is where tools like SSRS or even Excel Pivot Charts are a better option – Power View does not have these features TOC Back to TOC

10: Power View 13 Excel Features for Developers23 Cross filtering – I can click on the pie slice for Australia, and the bar chart above shades the monthly sales just for Australia TOC Back to TOC

24 11-Custom MDX in OLAP Pivot Tables 13 Excel Features for Developers When using OLAP cubes and we need to write custom MDX calculations, can use a free add-in: Excel OLAP PivotTable Extensions Back to TOC

25 12-A special Pivot Chart 13 Excel Features for Developers Observation points in a scatter graph: each marker represents a city, their # of customers (bottom axis) and Internet sales (left axis). Chart shows relationship between the 2 variables Pearson correlation: measures the correlation or strength of linear dependence..85 to 1 = strong correlation.75 to.85 = moderate correlation <.75 = weak correlation (not very reliable) Regression trendline: shows slope calculation (every 1 customer results in $ $) in revenue) R-squared represents “goodness of fit” of plotted points relative to trendline (closer the line passes through the points, closer to 1 is the value) We can create this spreadsheet in Excel against OLAP data, deploy to SharePoint, and then use in a PPS dashboard, and take advantage of PPS filters Bottom axis: Customer Count by City Y-axis: revenue by city Back to TOC

26 13-Recommended Reading 13 Excel Features for Developers Back to TOC Great blog content for Excel, Power Pivot, DAX, Power BI, etc. They are great resources for newer features in Power BI (Power Maps, Power Query, etc) Chris Webb's Blog Alberto Ferrari's Blog Marco Russo's Blog