Introduction to Power Pivot - Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools for Excel Analysts - page 46

Figure 3-2: Use Power Pivot to analyze the data in the Customers, InvoiceHeader, and InvoiceDetails worksheets.
Preparing your Excel tables
When linking Excel data to Power Pivot, it's best to first convert your data to explicitly named tables.
Although it's not technically necessary, giving your tables easy-to-remember names helps track and
manage your data in the Power Pivot Data Model. If you don't convert your data to tables first, Excel
does it for you and gives your tables useless names like Table1 and Table2.
Follow these steps to convert each dataset into an Excel table:
1. On the Customers tab, click anywhere inside the data range.
2. Press Ctrl+T.
3. In the Create Table dialog box, check that the range for the table is correct and that the My
Table Has Headers option is selected. Click the OK button.
The Table Tools Design tab appears on the Ribbon.
4. On the Table Tools Design tab, click in the Table Name input and give your table an easy to
remember name (see Figure 3-3).
This ensures that you will be able to recognize the table when adding it to the internal Data
Model.
5. Repeat Steps 1-4 for the InvoiceHeader and InvoiceDetails datasets.