Wesley Backelant fired off an early morning tweet on the newly-released Microsoft Analytics add-in for Twitter, and I gotta say that I’m pretty excited. Twitter is my social media tool of choice, and I’ve been playing around with various .NET twitter-related libraries out on codeplex in an effort to do many of things this add-in does out of the box.

Essentially the add-in is made up of:

• Logic to search twitter for users, keywords, and hashtags.
• A PowerPivot data model to store search results
• A set of Excel worksheets used to report on topics (keywords), people (users), sentiment (tone) and see individual tweets themselves

….and source code. Glorious, beautiful source code. The final worksheet in the add-in contains all the code you need to rebuilt this solution yourself. Bless you Microsoft & Extended Results: I haven’t giggled like a little girl at 6AM in quite a while.

A quick jump start:

First,  download it:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26213

Here’s a Wiki for late-breaking issues with the add-in:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3296.aspx

After installing the add-in, you’ll want to insert keywords, hashtags, and people into the search window. I, of course, search for myself:

The add-in’s code takes over to do the dirty work with Twitter, and you’ll see:

…and:

You’ll  be prompted to do a manual data refresh both in the PowerPivot environment and  in “Excel proper”, and you’re ready to rock and roll.

Let’s run through the worksheets you can play with step-by-step, shall we?

Tone Dictionary

The Tone Dictionary is a handy “configurator” which lets you define what words should drive positive and negative sentiment on the “Tone” worksheet that we’ll look at later. I rather enjoyed reading some of the negative terms like “terrible”, “sucks” and “worthless”. Well done! All of these terms can be edited:

Topics

The Topics worksheet is your overview data – it includes some basic information like total tweets, retweets, mentions, and more:

There is an excellent array of pre-configured slicers to let you filter by search query, time of day, tone, users, mentions, and hashtags.

I give Microsoft and Extended Results big props for adding some nice time intelligence to this worksheet. I’ve filtered the results below so that you can see when I do the majority of my tweeting – before work, with a little bit of time spent after 5:

On an unsliced workbook you can immediately see that Wesley got a lot of @mentions, while I did a lot of tweeting against the #businessinteligence and #msbi hastags (two of my favorite haunts):

People

On the People worksheet you have the same set of slicers to work with, and the ability to see top tweeters, mentions, retweeters, and mentioners.

You can also spot who is tweeting “positively” and “negatively” based on the tone dictionary:

It looks like Cecillio is having a bad day over on #businessintelligence! Want to know why? Just go over to the Details worksheet and find the tweet in question:

Once I did my filtering, I found that he had just used an unhappy emoticon – he didn’t drop a “sucks”, “worthless”, or “terrible”, which left me a bit disappointed:

#WorkModeOn –>; #BusinessIntelligence de data desde el 2001 al 2011 WTF Cubo y mas Cubo hoy   #SQLServer2008

Tone

Finally, there’s the Tone worksheet – you’ll use it do determine how folks are feeling about people, topics, and anything else:

You can see that something “good” happened on the #businessintelligence hastag on 6/9, and that yours truly has been pretty neutral the last few days.

Wrap up

This is good stuff. It is eminently configurable with the ability to add additional slicers, leverage DAX,  and use calculated measures in PowerPivot. Including source code so you can rip down and rebuild this yourself? Genius! Download, use and love this thing!

If you’re interested in a little bit of “out of the box Mobile BI” and don’t want to buy 3rd party products, you can always view your published Excel Services & PowerPivot workbooks on the iPad.

Designing and/or re-factoring your reports for the device does take a bit of thought and planning, however. This post is a brain dump on things you should consider with some hints and tips. Most of what I’m going to give you falls into the “no duh” category, but I think you’ll pick up some useful nuggets.

Size Matters

Truth. Your biggest challenge will be building a report which relates a meaningful amount of information in the limited amount of screen real estate you’ll have to work with. You thought it was tough artfully cramming things into a PPS dashboard? Meh! Take the training wheels off!

Develop and Test Small

You may have an iPad to begin with, and even if you do it’s a pain in the rear to constantly refresh your changes on the device to see how things are looking. Develop and test as much as you can on your desktop/laptop.

Install Safari on your desktop and configure it to act like Safari-on-iPad:

1. Open Safari’s Options dialog.
2. Click Advanced on the Options dialog’s toolbar.
3. Select Show Develop menu in the menu bar.
4. if you want to go all out, click Security on the Options dialog, and de-select Enable plug-ins and Enable Java. This isn’t strictly necessary, but the items don’t work by default on some iOS Safari installations as far as I know.
5. Close the Options dialog. If the Menu Bar isn’t showing in Safari (File, Edit View, History, Bookmarks, etc.) Choose the Options drop down, and de-select Hide Menu Bar.
6. On the Options drop-down, select Hide Bookmark Bar.
7. On the  Develop menu, choose User Agent, then Safari iOS x.xx – iPad
8. Hide the the Menu Bar again.
9. Here’s the painful part: Go 1024 x 768 on your screen resolution. I know, it’s horrible. Do it, and maximize Safari.

After Safari is on your machine and you’re running in 1024 x 768, you can begin developing,

Basic Guidance

Remember, no Silverlight. The fancy PowerPivot Gallery visualizations like Theater, Carousel, etc. don’t work on the iPad since iOS doesn’t support Silverlight and Flash. Make sure you set the default view of the gallery to “All Documents”.  If you don’t want to go this route, you can create a Web Part page for each workbook and add an Excel Web Access Web Part to display the workbook. 

Assume that users don’t know iPad navigation tricks. That’s right, believe it or not some of your users may be dumb. They have an iPad, but they don’t know how to use it. I know, I know – could never happen. If it does happen, they’ll get hopelessly lost trying to navigate your report, and just give up. So throw ‘em a bone with some quick movement tips.

Consider adding a new worksheet to the front of your workbook which explains the two-finger scroll gesture. Some sample text:

To navigate the reports in this workbook:

• Use the worksheet tabs at the bottom of the browser to move from worksheet to worksheet
• To view different parts of a worksheet, press and hold two fingers to the iPad screen, then scroll while keeping your fingers on the screen

Move slicers to the bottom of each worksheet. Horizontal slicers use up valuable screen space and will nearly always force your users to scroll. First, shrink these suckers up so they use less vertical space. Next step, move them to the bottom of the sheet unless it’s absolutely necessary you keep them at the top.

Remove logos and artwork in the report header. Artwork and/or a logo in the header of a report adds a dash of class. However, on the iPad, it makes it less likely you’ll see all the information you need on one screen without a scroll.

Expand row-level groupings in your PivotTables. I like to collapse all the grouped rows in my PivotTables to save on vertical space. While this generally is a good design decision, it doesn’t take into account a mantra that is critical for you to understand in iPad-land. Repeat after me:

The iPad soft keyboard is evil. Do everything you can to prevent it from getting in the way of your user

Each time your user has to interact with a + or – symbol to expand or collapse a grouping of rows, iPad’s keyboard will appear. This gets really old after about the first 10 seconds. Before you save the workbook to SharePoint, expand all your row groupings so users only have to scroll the workbook to view the information it contains rather than do a scroll + “tap” (on the row).

You might also want to add another “navigation note” about row groups to your “how to navigate” cheat sheet:

• To expand or collapse a group of rows or columns, tap and briefly hold the + or – symbol. The web report will re-paint 2-3 seconds later

Consider replacing slicers altogether. When one interacts with a slicer in any way, the blasted soft keyboard will make an appearance. In addition, there are no iPad gestures you can use to easily select multiple slicer items like one can by CTRL and SHIFT clicking in Windows. The “old-fashioned” Report Filters aren’t as pretty or smart as Slicers, but one can select multiple items inside them and they only pop the soft keyboard once when one opens the filter dialog page.  In some cases, you’re just going to need to bite the bullet and use them instead of slicers.

Other Ideas

Turn off the Excel Toolbar: The Excel toolbar becomes something of an appendix when your PowerPivot workbook is viewed on the iPad. Why not remove it and get a few extra rows in your worksheet displayed? You can do so by displaying the workbook inside an Excel Web Access web part, and then turning off the toolbar:

Modify your Master Page: Even a basic SharePoint site generally uses (wastes?) vertical space with header logos, breadcrumb trails, and alike.  If you have the CSS chops, why not get into the master page and modify some of this to free up more room?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it was fixed. A colleague at Microsoft was kind enough to test this, and he still sees the same problem. So, word to the wise: don’t install IE9 on the SharePoint app servers which will be doing snapshot generation.