Product Description
PowerPivot Succinctly
PowerPivot is an add-in for Microsoft Excel 2010 that enables you to import millions of rows of data. Therefore from multiple data sources into a single Excel workbook, create relationships between heterogeneous data, create calculated columns and measures using formulas, build PivotTables and PivotCharts etc.
- Did you know you can handle millions of rows of data on your desktop?
- Build interactive charts and tables that analyze that data instantly?
- Create dashboards that bring together related data without needing a huge BI project?
- Explore your data in real time?
- Even plot it on a map?
Of course you can. Since you just do it in Excel. No, seriously. There’s a surprisingly unknown tool in Excel called PowerPivot. That delivers all of those capabilities in a format that is familiar to Excel users, simple to use, and very powerful.
Introduction of PowerPivot
Microsoft first introduced PowerPivot to the world in beta as “Project Gemini” in 2009. It gave desktop-based data analysts a new way to analyze large amounts of data in memory in the familiar environment of Excel. Also it was formally introduced as a free add-in for Excel 2010. And made a standard component from 2013.
It also found a home within Analysis Services — a core part of Microsoft’s SQL Server BI Platform. As a new way of modeling data for the enterprise. PowerPivot is an in-memory cube for the desktop. What that means to you firstly is that your data is modeled with all the power of a cube in a full blown BI solution.
So that means your data relationships are all manage for you and aggregations by different slicers is something that happens natively. Without additional effort on the part of the user. Because it opens the door to powerful, context-aware calculations that enable analysis without you constantly reworking formulas for different scenarios.
And cubes have traditionally been accessed using a language called MDX (for Multi Dimensional Expressions). MDX is a difficult language to master. And has often been one of the barriers to broader adoption of power cube technologies. Also the query language used by PowerPivot is DAX (for Data Analysis Expressions).
Due to the language is deliberately similar to Excel formula-like to make it accessible to business users.
Table of Contents:
1 : Introduction
2 : PowerPivot Model Basics
3 : Using your PowerPivot Model
4 : Sharing your PowerPivot Model
5 : A Note on Instability
6 : Deep Dive – The x Velocity engine
7 : Additional Resources