In this post, I’ll summarize the PASS Business Analytics Conference’s Keynote Day #1:

The structure of the Keynote:

One of the NEW challenges that Data Pros face today is complexity involved in building a BI solution. Following slides nicely represent the challenge from the Tools standpoint:

Image Courtesy: https://twitter.com/SQLGal/status/322342662013321216

Microsoft’s Goal is to SIMPLIFY the above situation

We need to do the same thing with BI that PowerPoint did to the slide projector. SIMPLIFY IT. #passbac

— Mark Vaillancourt (@markvsql) April 11, 2013

NEW Tools:

> Data Explorer (Excel add-in)

> Power View in Excel 2013

> Geo Flow

Key Take away from the demo’s was:

Power View is a great tool that you could use to extract insights from data.

E.g. Insights about Music Charts from Germany:

#MilliVanilli for Germany?JS Bach just rolled over #passbac

— Mark Tabladillo (@MarkTabNet) April 11, 2013

Now combine the power of Power View w/ the new capabilities like Data Explorer that let’s you find, combine & refine data via Data Explorer.

In the Demo, they combined data in hadoop w/ data in relational sources. This is Powerful!

And Also

The Preview for GeoFLow in Excel was announced!

They had a great demo on a pretty big touch device:

Sorry for the poor image – but imagine a touch device of that size w/ an interactive data visualization that has 3D geo maps!

Conclusion:

They had a nice message at the end of the keynote:

Nice Message: EVERYONE should be able to extract insights from data. It should not be business intelligence but BASIC intelligence #passbac

— Paras Doshi (@paras_doshi) April 11, 2013