Getting Great Results with Excel Pivot Tables, PowerQuery and PowerPivot

CHAPTER 8Improving a Pivot Table with Power Pivot

In the previous chapter, you learned to make pivot tables from more than one table using the data model. There's a lot more you can do with the data model. In this chapter, we will go further with the data model using Power Pivot.

Power Pivot is a set of tools designed to take your pivot tables and your data to the next level. With Power Pivot, you can create formulas in the powerful Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) language to further support and analyze the tables within the data model. Power Pivot can also create pivot tables from very large databases, much larger than what a regular Excel spreadsheet can handle. Power Pivot will allow you to pull data from multiple sources into the data model and then join the tables from different sources together to make pivot tables and pivot charts. Power Pivot also has a feature called a key performance indicator (KPI), which adds a visual element to a pivot table. Power Pivot can analyze your data in many more ways, but, for the purpose of this book, I will show how Power Pivot can be used to support pivot tables. This chapter will show you how to activate the Power Pivot add‐in and how to use some of the Power Pivot features.

NOTE  For the examples presented in this chapter, you can use the sample file called p owerpivot.xlsx that is included with this book. You may also need ...