(ethereal music) - Up next, we'll take a
tour of the latest updates that integrate Power BI
inherently with Microsoft's collaboration analytics stack, including the new Power
BI app for Microsoft Teams that makes it easier to access,
share, and act on insights as you work, the latest AI-driven
visualization capabilities with smart narratives, and
achieving near real-time analytics over your enterprise
data using hybrid tables. And to walk us through all
of this, I'm joined today by Vanessa Fournier,
from the Power BI team. Welcome back to the show. - Thank you. It's so nice
to be back in person. - It's so great to have you back on. So it's been a while, actually,
since we've done a deep dive on Power BI, and it's really great to see that it's continued to
evolve really as a canvas for insights on all your data, regardless of its size or scale. - You know, the whole design
principle behind Power BI is to make it accessible
for everyone to use, from your novice to your data scientist. We want to build a business
intelligence offering that supports everyone with
gleaning insights that drive their personal decisions
or their business. We have literally hundreds
of interactive visualizations at your disposal to build
reports and dashboards today, and we're continually
working to make the Power BI experience better, so
it's the single canvas for business insights,
powerful visualizations, and AI-driven analytics. And together with Azure Synapse Analytics, it works across all of your data sources, wherever they sit and no matter the size. Also, within the new
Microsoft Teams Power BI app, we're helping you quickly
discover and cascade actionable insights,
collaborate with others, and make faster, more
personal, informed decisions the way that you want to work. - And of course, Power BI is
part of the Power Platform of low-code tooling, making
it easy to integrate insights into your Power Apps and Power
Automate business processes. That said, though, let's
take a look at some of the new capabilities,
and why don't we start with the Microsoft Teams integration? - Sounds good. Let me show you Power BI with the new Teams app. All right, here, you can get to the app from Teams' app store. Or in my case, our Teams
admin has actually pinned it centrally for everyone on my team, so it's easy to find on the left rail. I can see recommended reports
where we use intelligence from the Microsoft Graph
to surface what's trending, along with everything
I've recently accessed. I'm interested in the
Sales Pipeline report, so I'll open it. And if I go into the Insights tab, I can see some AI-generated
insights that show key influences that affect the pipeline. Here, I can see that Anne
Weiler is taking the longest to close her deals, 38
days longer than average, or around 144 days total. So it looks like I need to
give this some attention, and I can easily call in the expertise of my team to investigate. So right from the report,
I can share this insight, along with what could impact our forecast. In fact, I'm going to
share it via a Teams chat with you, Jeremy. You're a member, so maybe you
could help us investigate. - Okay, sounds good. In fact, I can see your
notification pop up right here. So I'm going to jump into
the chat and take a look at the link that you sent. And it takes me directly
to that Power BI report, and from here, we can
start to work together to figure this out; and
I can see what you mean by Anne Weiler's closing
times being a lot higher than average, so let's take a look at what that root cause might be. So I'm going to use a
decomposition tree to look at some of the differences
between the sellers who are represented
here by the owner value. Now, first you can see our top
seller here, Riley Johnson. So I'm going to select the fields I want. First, the product category. Then I'll select the industry
field, just to see the types of customers they're working with. And so Riley, you know,
we can see that with her, accessory sales are
roughly equal to the sum of devices and warranties. Now, computer software, business
services, and healthcare appear also to be the
highest customer industries that she's working with. With Anne Weiler, though,
who's pulling our averages down a bit, you know, with
the longest time to close, I can see that their mix of accessories is a lot lower than Riley's. In fact, here, their
industry mix also is highest for medical, restaurants,
and industrial machinery, and we happen to know that
in our case, these industries take a lot longer to close deals. So now we can maybe work
with Anne to really focus on accessories or target
different industries, so we can start to bring
her closing times down. - Right, and this is a
great example of how you can collaborate with your
peers in a data-driven way to highlight and resolve
issues within the context of Microsoft Teams, by
sharing real-time insights. Next, I can also drive more
progress against the issue by using the new Goals
functionality in Power BI. This allows me to curate
core business metrics that I want to track in a scorecard. I have one here for sales
goals that I've added to my weekly team meeting, and
based on the previous example, I'll set up a new goal to
ensure that our seller's deals are closed within five days
of our target of 100 days. I'll edit this and I can create a new goal and give it a name of Close Rate. Now I'll select the data I want
to track, and in this case, it's Sales Pipeline,
and there's the report and pages we saw earlier. Now I'll head back into
Insights and choose the data point I want,
the average days to close. Then I'll connect that to our goal. Here I can see it
populates the current value in our report of 104, and in target, I'll set it manually to 100 days. Over here for status, I'll
set up a new rule by clicking. And in my case, I'm
looking for a value change that is greater than 5%. Then, if that condition is met, I'll change the status to at risk. Otherwise, if it's less
than 5% from our target, I can definitely say
the status is on track. From there, I can save it and confirm for the all up set of goals. Since I just added this close rate goal, I'll go ahead and add a note
with a new check-in for today to say that we're on target. And this view gives a
great tool to the team to track progress against the goals that are important to us. - Right, I can see this driving
a lot better collaboration around specific insights
and data, but why don't we step back and take a look at
the Power BI report itself? So what are some of the
recent updates there? - You know, Jeremy, we're
constantly adding visualization and AI power-derived insights. In fact, one that I love
is called Smart Narratives. This allows you to add verbal
narrative to the reports to land key takeaways
and point out trends. I'm going to open our
win/loss report in edit mode. I can add a smart narrative
which uses built-in AI to summarize the whole report for me, to describe the top takeaways. Already, you can see that it's
found the month of December was almost four times better than July, along with more insights. I can also customize the narrative with my own values, text, and formatting. Here, I'll add the
title 'Smart Narrative.' I want to create a dynamic
value, so I just start typing what I want, like revenue
+ revenue in pipeline. I can even add some text around this. I'll also add a second dynamic data point that calculates its
percentage goal attainment. Now I can add some formatting. So here, I'll just bold the key values. You can also create a
smart narrative around a single visualization, for
more tightly-scoped insights. To do that, I'll right
click on the visual I want and select summarize. Now I have a smart narrative
for the close rates of the last eight months,
and I just need to place the summary where I want it on the page. What's also great is that when
I interact with this report, like selecting the category devices, I can see that both narratives
automatically change based on the filter I select. - And this is a really amazing
technology to summarize, you know, all the report
insights into words, and I can really see this
being used, for example, with cut and paste to put it
in the email or Teams chat when you're sharing report
insights with other people. So do you have other smart visualizations that have AI built in? - Yes, we are invested in
bringing out-of-the-box, easy-to-use AI to all of our
users, like key influencers, text and image recognition,
and the decomposition trees we saw earlier, just to name a few. If you've ever wondered
why there is a spike or dip in a graph or chart, Analyze
will explain the increase or decrease without you
having to dive back in to the data and explore. Here it found that the states
of New Mexico and Idaho had significant increases that
led to this particular spike. It's also found the variances by industry. And this is data you
can't see from the report. AI has discovered the root
causes in the underlying data. There's also AI built into
the line charts that you can automatically detect anomalies
in your time series data, providing explanations for the anomalies, again, to help you speed
up root cause analysis. Here, it's found the
correlation between daily sales discount rates and overlaid
those against revenue per day to explain the increase. Again, these are things that
could be super difficult to find without this anomaly detection. - And it'd be a massive
time saver, I think, especially compared to
manually sifting through and digging through that data. So now we've actually seen
how Power BI can unify data and the stories around it,
but can we take a look at what's behind your report? - Absolutely. Behind the
scenes, we're querying billions of rows of
data, from Dynamics 365 to Azure data services, as well. And we've used Azure Synapse to bring all of the data together. You can connect to data from anywhere, across clouds or on-prem, and with Synapse Link for Dataverse, you can now easily bring
in your operational data. - And by the way, setting
this up is pretty easy. In fact, I'll show you right now. So starting in the Power
Apps Studio under Dataverse and Azure Synapse Link, I'll
add a new link to a data lake. I'm going to choose to
connect to my workspace, and then I'll fill in kind
of the standard Azure fields that you would expect, along
with my Synapse workspace. Now, here, I'm going to choose the tables that I want to link. I'm just going to pick a few here. I'll pick account, then
I'll search for user, then select it, and now I can
go to my Synapse workspace. And there on the left, you can already see the two tables there, right
from my Dataverse environment. So with all this operational
data now flowing in, we've got our billions of rows of data. How do we make sure that
our query performance is fast enough? - The key to this is Power
BI Gen 2, and it now supports large scale analytics
with fast performance using a new capability
called Hybrid Tables. These let you query massive
dynamically growing datasets using Power BI without any lag. And the best way to
explain this is by showing how to set it up. Here is a report with our website traffic. It has an underlying dataset
of hundreds of millions of rows, and is growing quickly. From the data model view, I'll show you the DemoClicks Hybrid Table. As you can see under incremental
refresh, the single table has been set up with
multiple data segments. The diagram at the bottom is
a great visual representation for how data is flowing,
stored, and refreshed. We've set the first segment
in the table to archive data for the past one year. The second is to set
incremental refresh data just for the past one day,
and with get the latest data in real time with direct query selected, there is also real-time data coming in. I'll close this view and
then publish the report. With the Hybrid Table set
up, it means that even though our table contains a year's worth of data, it's like querying one day's
worth of incremental data. - So with all that data flowing in, then, how do we take advantage of this then, with our report itself? - To do that, I need to change
it to automatically refresh every few seconds. So I'll go to the page Refresh
Control and turn it on. First I'll change the interval to seconds, then make it five. Now I just need to save
it and open the report's reading view, and you can immediately see that the total visits and unique visits are growing every few seconds. Below that, you can see the raw data rows. I'm going to change the
sorting of the datastamp column so the newest rows are on top. And now you can see the most
recent site visits refreshing every few seconds as well,
and even though the underlying data is changing and there are
hundreds of millions of rows, Power BI returns the
results in near real time. - And this is really powerful stuff. I mean, we've just seen now
the fusion between Power BI, the collaboration tools, AI,
and also our analytics stack. - It is, and this is really just a taste of everything that's
to come with Power BI. In fact, a lot of recently
added capabilities that we didn't have time to cover today can be found in our blog. - And I know a lot of
people probably watching are really looking forward to
getting their hands on this and trying it out. - Well, the good news is that you can try everything that we showed today. The Power BI app in
Teams is available now, Goals and Hybrid Tables are in preview with Power BI Premium, and
you can always learn more at powerbi.com. - Thanks so much, Vanessa,
for joining us today and sharing all the updates with Power BI. And of course, keep checking
back to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest tech updates, and don't forget to
subscribe to our channel if you haven't already,
and thank you for watching. (ethereal music)
