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Thursday 1 August 2013

Power Pivot

What is Power Pivot?

Power Pivot is an Excel add-in to connect, analyze & visualize massive amounts of data.
Lets take a closer look at the definition.
Connect: You can use multiple tables of data & set up relationships between them using Power Pivot. For example, you can connect customer details to sales transactions so that you can summarize sales by customer location or gender easily.
Analyze: You can create simple pivot table style reports or create something exceedingly complex by defining your own calculated fields for values area of the pivot. There is a whole set of formulas defined for exactly this purpose, called as DAX formulas.
Visualize: Instantly filter your reports using slicers, time lines (Excel 2013 or above only), conditional formats, pivot charts etc. You can even define KPIs and see the performance in bands.
Massive Amounts of Data: Although your typical Excel worksheet contains a million rows, if you tried to load even half of those with any data, Excel would quickly become slow & lazy. Power Pivot can take a million rows for breakfast and would be hungry for more. It can processes millions of rows of data very quickly and easily, all from the comfort of a standard desktop or laptop.
Excel Add-in: Power Pivot is an optional free add-in that works with Excel 2010 or above. If you are running Excel 2010, you need to download and install it. Users of Excel 2013 have it easy. Power Pivot comes pre-packaged with Excel, you just need to enable it.
You can do so much more by using & mixing various features of Excel & Power Pivot. Few possibilities are,
  • Define your own measures (calculated fields for power pivot reports) that can summarize data the way you want
    • Sum of sales YTD
    • Count of distinct customers per product
    • Ratio of sales made to single moms vs. single dads
    • % of products made by top 10 employees in all etc.
  • Slice and dice data anyway you want
    • Filter all reports & charts based on multiple linked slicers
    • Slice reports based on values in another (non) related table
  • Fetch data from different data sources & integrate
  • Set up Power View sheets to create rich visualizations of your data (Excel 2013 only)
    • Create maps, rich interactive charts & more
  • Integrate with Excel features to create stunning reports & dashboards
    • Combine Power Pivot outputs with Excel features like sparklines, conditional formats, charts & form controls
    • Use references to fetch pivot table values & present them in dashboards

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