Excel Dashboards and Reports, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17: Using the Internal Data Model and Power View

In This Chapter

• Understanding the internal Data Model

• Starting a Power View dashboard

• Creating and working with Power View charts

• Visualizing data on a Power View map

Excel 2013 introduces a new feature called Power View. Power View is essentially an interactive canvas that allows you to display charts, tables, maps, and slicers in one dashboard window. The components in the Power View window are inherently linked so that they all work together and respond to any filtering or slicing you apply while using the dashboard. Select a region in one chart, and the other components in the Power View dashboard automatically respond to show you data for only that region.

This powerful feature runs on the new internal Data Model found in Excel 2013. The internal Data Model is an in-memory analytics engine that allows you to store disparate data sources in a kind of OLAP cube within Excel. OLAP is a category of data warehousing that allows you to mine and analyze vast amounts of data with ease and efficiency.

This chapter shows you how to combine the internal Data Model and Power View to create powerful interactive dashboards.

Sadly, Microsoft has made Power View available only with Office 2013 Professional Plus or the Office 365 Small Business Premium subscription service. You won’t even see the options for Power View if you ...