Visual Intelligence: Microsoft Tools and Techniques for Visualizing Data

Appendix A

Choosing a Microsoft Tool

When working in the Microsoft business intelligence toolset, it’s important to realize that you will not standardize on one tool for your visualizations. Each tool in the tool box has its own purpose, and you will frustrate yourself trying to make the wrong tool do the job of another—just as it would be frustrating to try to drive in a nail with a screwdriver. In this appendix, you discover the strengths and weaknesses of each tool.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Each Tool

As mentioned in Chapter 2, the Microsoft toolset loosely follows the strategic/tactical/operational levels, with a tool for each level. However, the correlation is loose, and with the launch of Power View as an application within SharePoint and a visualization within Excel, the tactical level has been split into two categories: PowerPivot in Excel for the data modeling, and Power View for the visualization. Consequently, the correlation between the toolset and the levels has become even weaker. This chapter explores the uses of each tool and shows you how to choose which to use.

PerformancePoint

As described in Chapter 3, PerformancePoint Services (PPS) has its antecedents in the original Business Scorecard Manager. The strongest feature of PPS is the scorecard building component.

PerformancePoint is directly aimed at the process of looking at a scorecard and quickly identifying where a problem exists, and then exploring prebuilt analysis paths to identify root causes of the ...