Book Image

Practical Business Intelligence

Book Image

Practical Business Intelligence

Overview of this book

Business Intelligence (BI) is at the crux of revolutionizing enterprise. Everyone wants to minimize losses and maximize profits. Thanks to Big Data and improved methodologies to analyze data, Data Analysts and Data Scientists are increasingly using data to make informed decisions. Just knowing how to analyze data is not enough, you need to start thinking how to use data as a business asset and then perform the right analysis to build an insightful BI solution. Efficient BI strives to achieve the automation of data for ease of reporting and analysis. Through this book, you will develop the ability to think along the right lines and use more than one tool to perform analysis depending on the needs of your business. We start off by preparing you for data analytics. We then move on to teach you a range of techniques to fetch important information from various databases, which can be used to optimize your business. The book aims to provide a full end-to-end solution for an environment setup that can help you make informed business decisions and deliver efficient and automated BI solutions to any company. It is a complete guide for implementing Business intelligence with the help of the most powerful tools like D3.js, R, Tableau, Qlikview and Python that are available on the market.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Practical Business Intelligence
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Connecting Excel to a SQL Server Table


Let's go ahead and fire up MS Excel 2016 on our local machine. Select Blank workbook, as seen in the following screenshot:

The next step is to click on the Data tab and select New Query and From Database. Then select From SQL Server Database, as seen in the following screenshot:

Tip

In cases where there is more than one database in the same SQL Server environment, the user will need to specify which database to use (AdventureWorks2014 in our case).

There will be a prompt for server name credentials from your MS SQL Server. Add your own SQL Server name to the box:

Expand the navigator on the left-hand side to expose all the tables available from the AdventureWorks database and select the table called Sales.SalesOrderHeader, as seen in the following screenshot:

Once the table has been selected, select the Load button to retrieve the table into the Excel spreadsheet. The columns will appear on a new sheet, with filterable column headers:

Exploring PivotTables...