Visual Intelligence: Microsoft Tools and Techniques for Visualizing Data

Chapter 6

Power View

This chapter focuses on building a solution in Power View so you can continue your data visualization efforts. It covers what Power View is, what the requirements are to create Power View reports, how to create a report, data modeling tips, and also how to deploy and share the reports.

What Is Power View?

Power View is a new reporting feature that was added in Reporting Services 2012. Power View was created to provide web-based self-service reporting capabilities to end users. It is designed for rapid data exploration and mash-ups of data from a tabular BI Semantic Model (BISM). The tabular data model can either be created using PowerPivot or Tabular Analysis Services. Users can very quickly create highly visual and interactive reports with Power View and the experience is greatly simplified. Report developers no longer have to deal with setting properties on objects included in the design, worry about relationships in the data, how a particular visualization will look, or how to connect items together for filtering.

With Power View the property settings are not present like they are with the other Reporting Services development tools such as Report Builder and Report Designer. The modeler of the data has already taken care of the relationships in the data. Power View provides you a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) experience, so there’s no flipping back and forth between design and preview anymore to see what your report will look like. Items within ...