Professional Microsoft® PowerPivot for Excel® and SharePoint®

Chapter 4. Enriching Data

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Refreshing data in PowerPivot

• Formatting data in PowerPivot

• Performing column operations in PowerPivot

• Understanding DAX

• Managing relationships

• Enriching data for the SDR Healthcare Audit application

In Chapter 3, you learned how to import data into PowerPivot for Excel. After importing data from multiple sources, the most natural thing to do is to integrate and enrich your data. The PowerPivot Window helps you to integrate data from multiple sources by setting up relationships. In addition, you can enrich your model and data within the PowerPivot Window.

You performed both integration and enrichment of data in Chapter 2. In this chapter, you will learn these in depth. After enriching your data, you can perform preliminary analysis of your data within the PowerPivot Window with operations such as filtering and sorting. In addition, you also have the capability to refresh your data within the PowerPivot Window. You'll learn about these operations in this chapter, along with internal details.

EXPLORING THE POWERPIVOT WINDOW

As a refresher to what you learned in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, Figure 4-1 shows various tabs in the PowerPivot Window. In the top and middle of Figure 4-1, you can see the tabs Home and Design. The common operations expected to be performed by customers appear in the Home tab. As the name suggests, the Design tab has operations that help in enhancing the data. You also have a context-sensitive tab called Linked Table shown ...