Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools for Excel Analysts

Chapter 3: Introduction to Power Pivot

In This Chapter

• Getting started with Power Pivot
• Linking to Excel data
• Managing relationships
• Creating a Power Pivot–driven PivotTable
• Creating your own calculated columns
• Utilizing DAX to create calculated columns
• Using calculated fields

Over the last decade or so, corporate managers, eager to turn impossible amounts of data into useful information, drove the BI industry to innovate new ways of consolidating data into meaningful insights.

The key product of Excel's business intelligence endeavor is Power Pivot (introduced in Excel 2010 as an add-in). With Power Pivot, you can set up relationships between large disparate data sources. For the first time, you can add a relational view to your reporting without using problematic functions such as vlookup. The ability to merge data sources with hundreds of thousands of rows into one analytical engine within Excel was groundbreaking.

With the release of Excel 2013, Microsoft incorporated Power Pivot directly into Excel — making its powerful capabilities available to you right out of the box!

You can find the example file for this chapter on this book’s companion Web site at www.wiley.com/go/bitools in the workbook named Chapter 3 Samples.xlsx.

In this chapter, you get an overview of those capabilities, exploring the key features, benefits, and capabilities of Power Pivot.

Understanding the ...