Chapter 2 – Getting Your Data Into PowerPivot

Watch an example of importing a 1.8 million row text file into Excel 2010 using PowerPivot.

Chapter 1 – Why You Will Love PowerPivot

There are five delicious reasons why you will want to try out PowerPivot…

PowerPivot is a free download that you can easily add to Excel 2010. It is the best product to come out of Microsoft in twenty years.

There are five amazing things that PowerPivot enables. Anyone of these five features would easily justify the purchase price:

• Nearly a billion rows in Excel. If you have a 64-bit version of Office 2010, you are limited by available memory on the machine (presumably much larger than the old 3GB limit in 32-bit Windows) and by the 2GB File Size limit. However, since PowerPivot can achieve 15:1 data compression, you can open 30GB data sets in PowerPivot. For a theoretical file with 7 columns, I calculate about 995 million rows as a theoretical limit.
• Join data from Sheet1 and Sheet2 in a single pivot table without doing any VLOOKUPs! Yes, if you are reading this blog, you can probably do VLOOKUPs with your eyes closed. But…VLOOKUPs are slow, and if you are doing five columns of VLOOKUPs on 5 million rows, the recalc times would be astronomical.
• Pull data from anywhere. From Excel. From SQL Server. From Access. From ATOM. From Oracle. From any ODBC client. Put data from Oracle on Sheet1 and data from an RSS feed on Sheet2. Copy and paste data from Excel into Sheet3. Mash up those data sets with a few clicks.
• Asymmetric reporting using Named Sets. Say that you currently have columns for 2009 Budget, 2009 Actual, 2010 Budget, 2010 Actual. You would like to report 2009 Actual and 2010 Budget. Pivot tables can not do that. In Excel 2010, the Excel team added Named Sets that allow OLAP pivot tables to create such a report. This sucks for you if your data is regular old Excel data. One benefit of PowerPivot is that your regular old Excel data turns into an OLAP cube by running it through PowerPivot. Thus, Named Sets become viable for you.
• New calculated fields using the new DAX language. DAX and Excel share 80 functions in common, so if you are familiar with LEFT, RIGHT, MID, INT, ROUND, then you will be comfortable with DAX. However, DAX adds 60 new functions that allow for miraculous calculations. The Time Intelligence functions allow you to compare one day’s sales to all MTD sales, sales from the prior month, MTD sales from the prior year, and so on.

The obvious question: why would PowerPivot be free? Microsoft is making the client version of PowerPivot available for free. There is a server version that you can buy. See? By tempting the 500 million people using Excel, they hope to sell some server versions. I don’t think this is a smart strategy, because the client version of PowerPivot is so powerful, 99% of the Excel people won’t ever need the server version.

In this introductory video, you can see 7 million rows in Excel.

PowerPivot for the Excel Data Analyst

 

Welcome to my blog to accompany the QUE book – PowerPivot for the Data Analyst: Microsoft Excel 2010.

While the book covers many topics of interest to people who use Excel and PowerPivot, I’ve chosen one topic in most chapters to demonstrate with a video. This blog will contain the complete collection of videos mentioned in the book, plus any other videos that I record as part of my Learn Excel from MrExcel Podcast.

About the Book

There are three types of people interested in PowerPivot:

• Excel Data Analysts
• SharePoint Admins
• SQL Server Analysis Services gurus

This book is aimed directly at the Excel Data Analysts who want to use the PowerPivot client with Excel 2010 for business analysis. There is only 1 chapter that touches on the SharePoint application.

If you are hoping to learn how to set up PowerPivot with SharePoint, this is not the book for you. Buy a book by one of the SharePoint guys, such as Denny Lee’s Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint. Besides having a much cooler cover (I am not sure what the skier has to do with PowerPivot, but it is a cool picture!), Denny will be able to walk you through the SharePoint issues of PowerPivot.

My book is designed for the people who use Excel every day, who likely use pivot tables already, and are eager to use PowerPivot to expand their analysis capabilities. I don’t work for Microsoft, so I am free to spend Chapter 3 telling you how the PowerPivot team missed the boat on a lot of features that you probably love from regular pivot tables. After all, you should be well-informed of what you are getting into. But, I also spend the bulk of the book teaching you how to get your Excel data into PowerPivot and how to leverage the fantastic tools that are there to create amazing reports.