Customer Reviews

Microsoft ® Office 2007 Business Intelligence: Reporting, Analysis, and Measurement from the Desktop

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The book does not include the code necessary to work through the examples. It's not included as a CD with the book or as a publisher download. The author's company will sell you the CD with the code and some "extras" for an additional $24.95. This makes the book excessively overpriced for what it's worth.

This is a good book.

Business Intelligence is a broad and many times an incorrectly used term. My opinion is that in essence, Business Intelligence is all about getting information into the hands of business users so they can make decisions.

This book is written for the business user. Microsoft is the fastest growing player in the Business Intelligence world. Their strategy is to leverage Microsoft Office to get the information into the hands of the business users. For example, think of how many people use Excel in the business place. That is a huge number of people to tap into who will already know how to use their Business Intelligence tools.

The book uses a diagram to show the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform. Each chapter then focuses in on a section of the diagram. It gives you a "you are here" pointer in the diagram. It gives you and explanation and then an example of how to do the important and common tasks. Each chapter is also independent of the other chapter, so you focus in on what you need to know with no worries that you missed something important in a previous chapter.

I am a Senior Business Intelligence Developer. I build the Data Warehouse and Data Cubes and develop the ETL. I have enough on my plate to keep me busy, but I still need to know all aspects of the platform. If you are a developer, I recommend this book because it gives you enough information to get you up to speed with Office 2007 as it relates to BI quickly. It shows you how to get your KPI's into SharePoint, for example. I recommend the book for developers as well.

The textual content of the book is very good, but as others have noted, the book does not contain a CD or url from which to download the examples. Nether the book's page on McGraw-Hill Professional nor the author's still under construction website contain a link to download the code.

It's good for the theory, but if you're inclined to follow examples from the book you're going to be disappointed.

--Update
Even after having McGraw-Hill request the files, the author's company only sent part of what I expected. My review stands. It's as good as any tech book that shows you the possibilities but doesn't let you follow along.

While I have considered myself reasonably good with Office, this book dramatically increased my understanding of the power hidden in Excel and the new possibilities of presentation. I would highly recommend the book to any government contractor, even if you haven't upgraded to Office 2007 as the descriptive text and easy to follow examples have direct application to earlier versions as well. I've cut my production time dramatically and, more importantly, can 'slice and dice' the data quicker and with better insight than ever before.

This book was exactly what I needed - a clear introduction to the BI features in Excel 2007 and SharePoint (no use for PerformancePoint - yet).

I needed something that had complete illustrations, as I was travelling and wouldn't have a connection to a SharePoint server. There were enough illustrations that I could follow what was being done without actually having to be on the computer.

It was also helpful to have refererence to the "Microsoft BI Matrix", a visual model showing how the Microsoft products fit together in Reporting, Analysis, Measurement and Planning.

Having read it through once, I'm now back in the office using the book to support "live" examples of what the author had written about.

Downside? At times, a little too free with exclaimation points - example "Using filters on actual PivotTables is one of the best ways to analyze data, and it's available to anyone with Excel!"

Gosh! Really! My Goodness!

It's a minor flaw in an otherwise accessible, understandable and well written introduction to the Business Intelligence features in Excel 2007.

Recommended for anyone looking to take advantage of Excel as a BI tool.

Executives don't have time to read technical manuals or head off to training for a week - we need something that quickly validates our current understanding and then jumps right in to explain what's useful and how to use it. Brief definitions and hints were good. A real step-by-step manual for using Excel 2007.

The author does a great job of presenting BI in an easy to understand way. I thought the parts on Outlook could've been less lengthy. This guy obviously has incredible depth of understanding on reporting. Over-all, an excellent book.

This book provided a great, easy to understand review of the features of Office 2007. Touched upon pivot tables, performance point, dashboards and scorecards. Plenty of examples were provided. This will definitely help me with implementing executive dashboards at my company.

Great resource. The book presented the BI information in a very clear and concise format. I thought the real life scenarios were on-point and extremely helpful. Also, the writing style was very relaxed and I dare say enjoyable to read. Does Doug have anything else in print?

My eyes have been opened to the amazing potential of Microsoft Office 2007 for Business Intelligence. This book is a resource I will use again and again.