Book Image

Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook

By : Davide Moraschi
Book Image

Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook

By: Davide Moraschi

Overview of this book

Business intelligence is becoming more important by the day, with cloud offerings and mobile devices gaining wider acceptance and achieving better market penetration. MicroStrategy Reporting Suite is a complete business intelligence platform that covers all the data analysis needs of an enterprise. Scorecards, dashboards, and reports can be explored and delivered on desktop, the Web, mobile devices, and the Cloud. With the latest Visual Insight tool, MicroStrategy brings the power of BI to the business users, allowing them to discover information without the help of IT personnel. Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook covers the full cycle of a BI project with the MicroStrategy platform, from setting up the software to using dashboards in the cloud and on mobile devices. This book uses step-by-step instructions to teach you everything from the very basics to the more advanced topics. We will start by downloading and installing the software and a well-known sample SQL Server database. Then, one brick at a time, we will construct a fully-featured BI solution with a web interface, mobile reporting, and agile analytics. The chapters are ordered by increasing difficulty, and each one builds on top of the preceding chapter so that the learning process is progressive. The examples given in this book are practical, and you will be able to see the immediate result of your efforts. We will first cover setting up the platform, including the creation of the metadata and the different objects that are part of a BI project: tables, attributes, and metrics. Then, we take a look at how to create and analyze reports, charts, documents, and dashboards, as well as how to manipulate data with the desktop application, the web Interface, and an iPad device. The last part of the book is dedicated to advanced topics like the new agile analytics technology from MicroStrategy, where we cover both Visual Insight and MicroStrategy Cloud Express. Whether you are a database developer, data analyst, or a business user, Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook will get you up to speed with one of the most powerful BI platforms on the market with the smallest possible investment of time and money.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Importing cross-tabbed data


Data files do not always come in tabular shape; more often than not they are cross-tabbed with some attributes on columns and others on rows. A very typical scenario is a worksheet with a time dimension in the columns headers (months, years…) like this one: http://xls.apphb.com/Ch13X2.xlsx, which represents the total expenditure per capita on health in different countries from 1995 to 2010. As you can see there are country names on rows and years on columns. The metric name is actually in cell A1.

MicroStrategy Express has the option to uncross this kind of files, pivoting the year on rows, and converting it to an attribute.

Getting ready

From now on, I will use the Chrome browser instead of IE, the main reason is that Chrome has better support of HTML5, which we'll need in the next recipes. So, if you don't have it already, please download and install it from http://at5.us/Ch13U5. In Chrome (as in other browsers), you can use the F11 key to toggle between full screen...