Before I start on how it works I just want to take a moment to talk about the install for Office 2013. To be fully honest I had a lot issues installing the new preview. When I got it going every time I would delete the new Power View tab, it would crash the program. I tried to uninstall all my past versions of office because I thought was causing issues but when I tried to reinstall, it was a no go. Looking around I was able to find an exe rather than the stream system Microsoft provided and it worked perfectly. I'm willing to overlook this for now because it is still in preview, but just keep that in mind before you try.
Ok onto the meat and potatoes. I took a sample of our gas production data which included the well name, date of the reading, MCF, and the lat and long coordinates.
The data is just a simple sample to play with. So using the article I mentioned earlier, I created two charts; a map and a scatter plot.
First lets talk about the map. It shows a circle representing the amount of MCF or gas that the particular well produced over the entire data set. to make it easier to look at, I made it color by the well name as well. If we click on a particular well, all the others will dim so it's easier to look at.
You can also zoom in which is helpful for when the wells are close together.
Now onto the scatter plot. This was really cool because it has an animation feature which will move the data points over time. I can't really show you in my blog, but if you look at this video starting at about 4 minutes in you can see the cool feature in action. As for what I created, you can see in my chart it shows us starting on 1/1/2004.
When you click on the play button at the bottom near the years it quickly moves forward in time and the bubbles move around. You can also pause it or click on a certain point in the timeline as well.
Another great feature is that the two charts are interactive with each other. If you click on the bubble on one it will do similar behavior in the other. I haven't played with this too much to see if that can be disabled for certain situations. More than likely you will just have to make another data set to make it independent. The other part that I love is you can pull this all into Power Point and make changes to the presentation on the fly while presenting.
Once I finally got it installed, I was able to make the visuals above in about 10 minutes. If you have spent any time using BI tools or Excel in the past you truly understand how much of a time savings that is. This probably would of taken me all day to do in the past. Microsoft defiantly needed to make a drastic change with Office and I for one think this is a game changer.
I have to present this sometime next week to my VP for his consideration, but after that it's back to studying for the test. Till next time.
