Data Mining for Business Intelligence, Second Edition uses real data and actual cases to illustrate the applicability of data mining (DM) intelligence in the development of successful business models. Featuring complimentary access to XLMiner®, the Microsoft Office Excel® add-in, this book allows readers to follow along and implement algorithms at their own speed, with a minimal learning curve. In addition, students and practitioners of DM techniques are presented with hands-on, business-oriented applications. An abundant amount of exercises and examples, now doubled in number in the second edition, are provided to motivate learning and understanding. This book helps readers understand the beneficial relationship that can be established between DM and smart business practices, and is an excellent learning tool for creating valuable strategies and making wiser business decisions. New topics include detailed coverage of visualization (enhanced by Spotfire subroutines) and time series forecasting, among a host of other subject matter.

This book introduces PowerPivot in Excel 2010 to power users and data analysts who want to use Excel as a business intelligence tool.

A book-and-video introduction to Microsoft's Business Intelligence tools If you are just starting to get a handle on Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) tools, this book and accompanying video provides you with the just the right amount of information to perform basic business analysis and reporting. You'll explore the components and related tools that comprise the Microsoft BI toolset as well as the new BI features of Office 2010. After a basic primer on BI and data modeling, the expert team of authors provides you with step-by-step lessons in the book and videos on the accompanying Video on how to use SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Reporting Services, Excel BI (including PowerPivot), and SharePoint. Integrates instructional videos with each of the lessons found in the book to enhance your learning experience Explores the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) toolset as well as the new BI features of Office 2010 Encourages you to practice what you've learned in "Try It Out" sections Contains video demonstrations that walk you through how to tackle each lesson featured in the book With Knight's Microsoft Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer, veteran authors present you with an ideal introductory book-and-video package so that you can get started working with the BI toolset immediately!

In the book 'Microsoft Visio 2010 Business Process Diagramming and Validation', you'll master the specialized features of Microsoft Visio 2010 Premium. This guide focuses on creating structured diagrams and validation rules, helping you enhance the accuracy and clarity of your business data visualization. What this Book will help me do Gain expertise in leveraging Visio's structured diagram tools for business process mapping. Learn how to build, customize, and apply Validation Rules for ensuring diagram accuracy. Develop skills in using the Visio Object Model and ShapeSheet to create advanced diagramming solutions. Understand and implement enhanced diagramming templates and rules, including BPMN and custom workflows. Acquire techniques for creating add-ins and publishing templates to establish company-wide diagramming standards. Author(s) David Parker, the author of this insightful book, is a seasoned professional with extensive experience in Microsoft Visio. His expertise includes creating complex diagramming solutions and training professionals in maximizing Visio's features. David's hands-on approach and understanding of business process needs make this a practical and enriching guide. Who is it for? This book is for users and developers of Microsoft Visio 2010 Premium Edition who want to master diagram validation and structured diagrams. Beginners with basic Visio knowledge and experienced users aiming to develop advanced applications will both benefit from this resource. It is especially useful for professionals seeking to enforce accuracy and compliance in their diagrams.

With PowerPivot, Microsoft brings the power of Microsoft's business intelligence tools to Excel and SharePoint users. Self-service business intelligence today augments traditional BI methods, allowing faster response time and greater flexibility. If you're a business decision-maker who uses Microsoft Office or an IT professional responsible for deploying and managing your organization's business intelligence systems, this guide will help you make the most of PowerPivot. Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint describes all aspects of PowerPivot and shows you how to use each of its major features. By the time you are finished with this book, you will be well on your way to becoming a PowerPivot expert. This book is for people who want to learn about PowerPivot from end to end. You should have some rudimentary knowledge of databases and data analysis. Familiarity with Microsoft Excel and Microsoft SharePoint is helpful, since PowerPivot builds on those two products. This book covers the first version of PowerPivot, which ships with SQL Server 2008 R2 and enhances Microsoft Office 2010. It provides an overview of PowerPivot and a detailed look its two components: PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint. It explains the technologies that make up these two components, and gives some insight into why these components were implemented the way they were. Through an extended example, it shows how to build a PowerPivot application from end to end. The companion Web site includes all the sample applications and reports discussed. What This Book Covers After discussing self-service BI and the motivation for creating PowerPivot, the book presents a quick, end-to-end tutorial showing how to create and publish a simple PowerPivot application. It then drilsl into the features of PowerPivot for Excel in detail and, in the process, builds a more complex PowerPivot application based on a real-world case study. Finally, it discusses the server side of PowerPivot (PowerPivot for SharePoint) and provides detailed information about its installation and maintenance. Chapter 1, "Self-Service Business Intelligence and Microsoft PowerPivot," begins Part I of the book. This chapter describes self-service BI and introduces PowerPivot, Microsoft's first self-service BI tool. It provides a high-level look at the two components that make up PowerPivot - PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint. Chapter 2, "A First Look at PowerPivot," walks you through a simple example of creating a PowerPivot application from end to end. In the process, it shows how to set up the two components of PowerPivot, and describes the normal workflow of creating a simple PowerPivot application. Chapter 3, "Assembling Data," starts off Part II of the book, and explains how to bring data into PowerPivot from various external data sources. It also introduces the extended example that you will build in this and subsequent chapters. Chapter 4, "Enriching Data," shows how to enhance the data you brought into your application by creating relationships and using PowerPivot's expression language, Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). Chapter 5, "Self-Service Analysis," describes how to use your PowerPivot data with various Excel features, such as PivotTables, PivotCharts, and slicers to do analysis. Chapter 5 also delves further into DAX, showing how to create and use DAX measures. Chapter 6, "Self-Service Reporting," shows how to publish your PowerPivot workbook to the server side of PowerPivot (PowerPivot for SharePoint), and make use of its features to view and update PowerPivot reports. It also shows how to use the data in a PowerPivot workbook as a data source for reports created in other tools such as Report Builder 3.0 and Excel. Chapter 7, "Preparing for SharePoint 2010," is the first chapter in Part III of the book. It describes the components of SharePoint 2010 that are relevant for PowerPivot, and looks at how PowerPivot for SharePoint interacts with those components. Chapter 8, "PowerPivot for SharePoint Setup and Configuration," provides instructions on how to set up and configure a multi-machine SharePoint farm that contains PowerPivot for SharePoint. Chapter 9, "Troubleshooting, Monitoring, and Securing PowerPivot Services," gives tips on how to troubleshoot PowerPivot for SharePoint issues. It also shows how to monitor the health of your PowerPivot for SharePoint environment, and discusses relevant security issues. Chapter 10, "Diving into the PowerPivot Architecture," describes at a deeper level the architecture of PowerPivot, both client and server. It also explains the Windows Identity Foundation and discusses the use of Kerberos in the context of PowerPivot for SharePoint. Chapter 11, "Enterprise Considerations," talks about common PowerPivot for SharePoint enterprise considerations: capacity planning, optimizing the environment, upgrade considerations, and uploading performance. Appendix A provides instructions for setting up the data sources that are used to build the SDR Healthcare extended example in Chapters 3 through 6. Additionally, two "bonus" elements are available online at this book's companion Web site: Appendix B is a comprehensive DAX reference that describes all the DAX functions and provides code snippets that show how to use them. A special chapter describes real-world scenarios in which PowerPivot is used to solve common problems.

ANALYZE HUGE AMOUNTS OF BUSINESS DATA FASTER, MORE EASILY, AND MORE ACCURATELY! Use Microsoft’s free PowerPivot add-in for Excel 2010 to analyze immense amounts of data from any source, perform state-of-the-art business analysis far more easily, and make better decisions in less time! Simple, step-by-step instructions walk you through installing PowerPivot, importing data, using PivotTables with PowerPivot, using super-powerful DAX functions and measures, reporting to print or SharePoint, and a whole lot more. Whatever your Excel data analysis experience, this book will help you use PowerPivot to get the right answers, right now—without IT’s help! • Import and integrate data from spreadsheets, SQL Server, Access, Oracle, text files, Atom data feeds, and other sources • Analyze multiple tables together, without complicated VLOOKUPs • Format, sort, and filter data in the PowerPivot window • Add calculated columns using new DAX functions • Create powerful reports from PowerPivot data–and format them so executives instantly get your point • Discover PivotTable tricks that work even better in PowerPivot • Control multiple PivotTable elements on one worksheet, with one set of Excel 2010 Slicers • Use DAX Measures to quickly perform tasks that were difficult or impossible with Calculated Fields • Compare today’s sales to yesterday’s–or to sales from the parallel period last fiscal year. • Use Named Sets to prepare asymmetric reports, show actuals for past months and plan for future months. About MrExcel Library: Every book in the MrExcel Library pinpoints a specific set of crucial Excel tasks and presents focused skills and examples for performing them rapidly and effectively. Selected by Bill Jelen, Microsoft Excel MVP and mastermind behind the leading Excel solutions website MrExcel.com, these books will • Dramatically increase your productivity–saving you 50 hours a year, or more • Present proven, creative strategies for solving real-world problems • Show you how to get great results, no matter how much data you have • Help you avoid critical mistakes that even experienced users make

Statistical analysis is essential to business decision-making and management, but the underlying theory of data collection, organization and analysis is one of the most challenging topics for business students and practitioners. This user-friendly text and CD-ROM package will help you to develop strong skills in presenting and interpreting statistical information in a business or management environment. Based entirely on using Microsoft Excel rather than more complicated applications, it includes a clear guide to using Excel with the key functions employed in the book, a glossary of terms and equations, plus a section specifically for those readers who feel rusty in basic maths. Each chapter has worked examples and explanations to illustrate the use of statistics in real life scenarios, with databases for the worked examples, cases and answers on the accompanying CD-ROM.

Statistics for Health Care Professionals: Working with Excel (second edition) is written in a clear, easily followed style keyed to the powerful statistical tool, Microsoft Excel 2007. It introduces the use of statistics applicable to health administration, health policy, public health, health information management, and other professions, emphasizing the logic of probability and statistical analysis in all areas. Coverage includes data acquisition, data display, basics of probability, data distributions, confidence limits and hypothesis testing, statistical tests for categorical data, tests for related and unrelated data, analysis of variance, simple linear regression, multiple regression, and analysis with a dichotomous categorical dependent variable. A glossary and section-by-section review questions round out this uniquely comprehensive and accessible text.

Pro SQL Server 2008 Analytics provides everything you need to know to develop sophisticated and visually appealing sales and marketing dashboards using SQL Server 2008 and to integrate those dashboards with SharePoint, PerformancePoint, and other key Microsoft technologies.

In this Wrox Blox, you'll learn how to create powerful Dashboards for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. First, we introduce Web Part Pages and some of the out-of-the box Web Parts available in WSS. We then look at how to use Web Part Connections to add interactivity to our Dashboards. Later we create advanced Dashboard Views using the Data Form Web Part available with SharePoint Designer 2007. While the author focuses on Windows SharePoint Services, all of the topics discussed also apply to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as it is a superset of WSS. This Wrox Blox will be valuable for anyone wishing to share data on their SharePoint site.

Get the end-to-end instruction you need to design, develop, and deploy more effective data integration, reporting, and analysis solutions using SQL Server 2008—whether you’re new to business intelligence (BI) programming or a seasoned pro. With real-world examples and insights from an expert team, you’ll master the concepts, tools, and techniques for building solutions that deliver intelligence—and business value—exactly where users want it. Discover how to: Manage the development life cycle and build a BI team Dig into SQL Server Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services Navigate the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) Write queries that rank, sort, and drill down on sales data Develop extract, transform, and load (ETL) solutions Add a source code control system Help secure packages for deployment via encryption and credentials Use MDX and DMX Query Designers to build reports based on OLAP cubes and data mining models Create and implement custom objects using .NET code View reports in Microsoft Office Excel and Office SharePoint Serverook

Think you can't have fun learning statistics? Think again. The Manga Guide to Statistics will teach you everything you need to know about this essential discipline, while entertaining you at the same time. With its unique combination of Japanese-style comics called manga and serious educational content, the EduManga format is already a hit in Japan. In The Manga Guide to Statistics, our heroine Rui is determined to learn about statistics to impress the dreamy Mr. Igarashi and begs her father for a tutor. Soon she's spending her Saturdays with geeky, bespectacled Mr. Yamamoto, who patiently teaches her all about the fundamentals of statistics: topics like data categorization, averages, graphing, and standard deviation. After all her studying, Rui is confident in her knowledge of statistics, including complex concepts like probability, coefficients of correlation, hypothesis tests, and tests of independence. But is it enough to impress her dream guy? Or maybe there's someone better, right in front of her? Reluctant statistics students of all ages will enjoy learning along with Rui in this charming, easy-to-read guide, which uses real-world examples like teen magazine quizzes, bowling games, test scores, and ramen noodle prices. Examples, exercises, and answer keys help you follow along and check your work. An appendix showing how to perform statistics calculations in Microsoft Excel makes it easy to put Rui's lessons into practice. This EduManga book is a translation from a bestselling series in Japan, co-published with Ohmsha, Ltd. of Tokyo, Japan.

Debra Dalgleish, Microsoft Office Excel "Most Valuable Professional" since 2001, and an expert and trainer in Excel, brings together a one-stop resource for anyone curious about representing, analyzing, and using their data with PivotTables and PivotCharts. You'll find this book inimitable when facing any new or difficult problem in PivotTables, covering the entire breadth of situations you could ever encounter, from planning and creating, to formatting and extracting data, to maximizing performance and troubleshooting. The author presents tips and techniques in this collection of recipes that can't be found in Excel's Help section, while carefully explaining the most confusing features of PivotTables to help you realize their powerful potential. The chapters in this book have been organized into a collection of recipes to take you step by step from the problem you are experiencing to the solution you are aiming for. Without fuss, you'll find clear and precise information to help you assess your situation, whether common or unique, and solve your problem. Working examples of complex PivotTables and numerous PivotTable programming examples will help you solve problems quickly, without the need to digest heavy content.

THE ONLY VISIO 2007 BOOK YOU NEED “This book makes Visio as much fun as a video game.” Bob and Joy Schwabach, “On Computers,” Universal Press Syndicate We crafted this book to grow with you, providing the reference material you need as you move toward Visio® 2007 proficiency and the use of more advanced features. If you buy only one book on Visio® 2007, Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Visio® 2007 is the only book you need. • Working with shapes, stencils, and themes • Using the Data Graphics feature for extra customization • Importing content from Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project • Displaying data as text, data bars, icons, and color-coding using Data Graphics • Creating custom stencils, icons, and templates • Storing and displaying employee information in organization charts • Customizing the layout of organization charts • Creating database models, flowcharts, and Gantt charts • Connecting shapes in network drawings • Using digital ink and animation • Creating macros • Handling guides and rulers • Working with layers • Getting the most from ShapeSheets

Beginning PivotTables in Excel 2007 explains what PivotTables are, how you can benefit from using them, how to create them and modify them, and how to use their enhanced features. Using a Pivot Table in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 is a quick and exciting way to slice and dice a large amount of data. Carefully explains the benefits of using Pivot Tables for fast data analysis Provides a step-by-step approach to those new to Pivot Tables Offers tips and tricks that cannot be found elsewhere

Create and distribute data-connected Microsoft Office Visio diagrams and reports Get full details on the powerful features of Microsoft Office Visio 2007 inside this comprehensive volume. Written by Visio expert David Parker, Visualizing Information with Microsoft Office Visio 2007 demonstrates how to effectively visualize, explore, and communicate complex business information. Learn to use PivotDiagrams, Data Graphics, and Smart Tags, as well as link data to shapes and create meaningful Visio documents and reports. Plus, you'll get vital security information, time-saving tips, troubleshooting techniques, and downloadable macros and code samples. Essential Skills for Database Users and Professionals Create shapes and link them to data Summarize and analyze information using PivotDiagrams Use Data Graphics, Smart Tags, and SmartShapes to reinforce information Generate robust Excel, HTML, and XML reports Create custom, reusable templates, stencils, and masters Update and enhance diagrams with Reviewer's comments and markups Integrate Visio diagrams with other Windows applications Publish and securely distribute Visio documents and summaries Extend functionality using VBA macros, add-ins, and wrapper applications

Get expert advice and learn how to master Microsoft® Office Visio® 2007—from the inside out! This book packs hundreds of timesaving solutions, troubleshooting tips, and workarounds, all in concise, fast-answer format. Includes a companion CD.

The smart way to learn the latest version of Microsoft® Office Visio® 2007—one step at a time! Build exactly the skills you need by working at your own pace through easy-to-follow lessons and hands-on practice files on CD.

The authorized guide to the latest edition of the #1 business intelligence software product - Crystal Reports. More than 16 million licenses of Crystal Reports have been shipped to date. This book is a reference designed to provide hands-on guidance for the latest release of the product suite. The latest version of Crystal Reports and the Business Objects enterprise reporting suite delivers vast product enhancements and a tighter integration that will drive upgrades from licensees. Brand new features (e.g. Dynamic and Cascading Parameter Generation) will also appeal to new audiences. Over 1 million new Business Intelligence licensees will be migrating to the Crystal Enterprise Reporting platform, as this is the first release of the software with the existing Business Objects (BO) products being integrated into the Crystal infrastructure. As Business Objects insiders, the authors bring unique and valuable real-world perspectives on implementations and uses of the Crystal Reports product. The book also includes content, tutorials and samples for reporting within the Microsoft Visual Studio.NET and J2EE development environments and also on top of the SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) and the Peoplesoft platform. Advanced content on report distribution and integration into the secured managed reporting solution known as Business Objects Enterprise XI, is also now included in this definitive user guide with coverage on the new Web Services SDK.

Become a savvy Microsoft Excel user. Pivot tables are a great feature in Excel that help you organize and analyze data, but not many Excel users know how to use pivot tables. Pivot Table Data Crunching offers a comprehensive review of all the functionalities of Pivot Tables from author Bill Jelen, otherwise known as Mr. Excel from www.mrexcel.com, and Michael Alexander, a Microsoft Certified Application Developer. The authors' practical scenarios and real-world advice demonstrate the benefits of Pivot Tables and how to avoid the common pitfalls of every day data crunching. Each solution presented in the book can be accomplished with resources available in the Excel interface, making Pivot Table Data Crunching a beneficial resource for all levels of Excel users.