Visual Intelligence: Microsoft Tools and Techniques for Visualizing Data

Chapter 7

PerformancePoint

PerformancePoint provides a very powerful toolset dedicated to designing scorecards and dashboards. PerformancePoint, being introduced in 2007, is one of the newest Microsoft business intelligence (BI) tools.

Compared with other Microsoft BI tools, PerformancePoint offers the designer the most useful functionality. As a key benefit for rapidly designing content, most of the useful functionality need not require planning and specific implementation because the features are common options associated with the various scorecard elements. Balancing this functionality is less control over visual elements, and rather limited print and export options. This chapter will provide an introduction to key PerformancePoint functionality used to develop visualizations.

Tabular versus Multidimensional Sources

The key foundational element used with a PerformancePoint solution is a data source. The data source supplies data for use by key performance indicators (KPIs), analytic charts, grids, dashboard filters, and other PerformancePoint objects. The types of data sources supported for use with PerformancePoint include tabular and multidimensional sources. It is important to note that PerformancePoint will treat both tabular and multidimensional sources the same way for the purpose of design activities.

Analysis Services in Tabular mode is treated as a multidimensional source in PerformancePoint, and its tables are treated as dimensions.

Tabular data sources include ...