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Building an SSAS cube isn’t for everyone. PowerPivot is! With PowerPivot, you are able to examine data over time and make comparisons of that data allowing you to make effective decisions to grow your business. You can use PowerPivot to:
- Import data from multiple sources
- Create linked data
- Create relationships between data from different sources
- Rename columns, and create calculated columns
- Create hierarchies
- Create PivotTables and PivotCharts
- Add Slicers
- Create a measure and KPI
- Create perspectives
- Save the resulting Excel spreadsheet
As with any Excel workbook, but with more functionality than Excel provides, you can create relationships between this data to form a single data set, and then perform analyses against the data set. You are not limited to one million rows either. PowerPivot enables you to add and work with millions of rows of data locally, depending on the actual physical memory available on your desktop computer.
In most cases, you will use the Table Import Wizard to import data. The wizard guides you through the process of setting up a connection to a data source and choosing what data to import, including selecting a subset of the rows and columns in the data source. When importing data from a database, the wizard also enables you to specify a custom query to import exactly the data that you want.
If you have not played around with PowerPivot, I strongly recommend that you take some time to do so. There is a multitude of tutorials available on a variety of web sites. Once you get the taste for it, I would suggest enrolling in a class to fully understand how using this tool could benefit your organization in countless ways.
