All posts by Neil Dunlop

I am a professor of Business and Computer Information Systems at Berkeley City College in Berkeley, CA.

Power BI Desktop

November 6, 2015 Neil Dunlop Leave a comment

Microsoft recently released Power BI Desktop, a stand alone program which provides a subset of the functionality of Power BI independent of Excel. It is available as a free download from this Microsoft download link.

Power BI Desktop allows importing tables from Excel, Access, SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle and many other sources and defining relationships among tables. It includes a query editor to shape the data and a design surface to easily create visualizations including bar charts, pie charts and many other formats.

Dustin Ryan has written a blog post giving a good introduction to using Power BI Desktop on his blog.

How Many Rows can Power BI Process

Link October 25, 2015 Neil Dunlop Leave a comment

A recent blog post by Christopher Woodill, VP Client Strategy of BDO Canada, claims he was able to load over 120 million rows into PowerPivot from a database of airline delays in the U.S. from 1998 to 2008. Here are his results.

Big Data on Desktop

August 6, 2015 Neil Dunlop Leave a comment

This is the blog for my book Beginning Big Data with Power BI and Excel 2013 published by Apress. The premise of the book is that most small to medium size organizations which are processing millions of rows of data can use Microsoft’s Power BI running on top of Excel 2013 without having to learn too many of the new Big Data technologies. What do you think?

Neil Dunlop

PowerBI