Introduction to Power Pivot - Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools for Excel Analysts - page 43

3

Introduction to
Power Pivot

In This Chapter

Getting started with Power Pivot

●

Linking to Excel data

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Managing relationships

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Creating a Power Pivot-driven PivotTable

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Creating your own calculated columns

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Utilizing DAX to create calculated columns

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Using calculated fields

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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 topic's companion Web site at www.
wiley.com/go/bitools in the workbook named Chapter 3 Samples.xlsx .

On the Web

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

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