Book Image

PowerPivot for Advanced Reporting and Dashboards

By : Robert Bosco J
Book Image

PowerPivot for Advanced Reporting and Dashboards

By: Robert Bosco J

Overview of this book

<p>Business intelligence technology gives an organization the power to make decisions using large volumes of data. By obtaining an adequate amount of data and integrating data from a variety of sources, a user can get a comprehensive knowledge of their business and business strategies. PowerPivot is a free add-in to the 2010 version of the spreadsheet application MS Excel. It extends the capabilities of the PivotTable data summarization and cross-tabulation feature with new features such as expanded data capacity, advanced calculations, the ability to import data from multiple sources, and the ability to publish workbooks as interactive web applications.</p> <p>PowerPivot for Advanced Reporting and Dashboards will teach you the fundamentals of PowerPivot as well as how to use the different data types available. This book also discusses useful tips and tricks for handling and resolving errors that might pop up while creating your report. With this book, you will be able to create relevant BI reports quickly and efficiently.</p> <p>Moving on from the basics, this book will explain the types of data sources that can be imported into PowerPivot. You will then delve into relationships, hierarchies, and data model creation using imported data. You will also learn how to employ DAX functions to transform unstructured data into structured data. Finally, this book will teach you how to create reports such as Pivot Tables, Pivot Charts, Slicers, KPIs, and Perspective reports using PowerPivot and how to publish them using the SharePoint server.</p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Benefits of using PowerPivot


Today it's quite difficult to find successful industries that have not leveraged BI technologies. Hence, everyone seeks BI tools for their data analysis and reporting purposes in order to make business decisions. In that case, PowerPivot meets their expectations and produces advanced reporting.

Most organizations spend a lot of time using Excel for data analysis, but don't allocate adequate time to fully analyze the data. By using PowerPivot, you can analyze the data in less time. It also has more advanced features than Excel, along with a seamless integration with the powerful visualization features of Excel. Some organizations have stored their data in different kinds of sources such as RDBMS, flat files, and CSVs. For these organizations, usage of ETL tools to create integration and data models and usage of some reporting tools for data analysis and reporting will be very helpful. However, since many forms of BI and ETL products are quite expensive for small organizations, PowerPivot may be used instead, since it is very feasible for these kinds of processes.

The vital advantage of PowerPivot is that you can do the analysis without the knowledge of SQL and Multidimensional Expressions (MDX). It's very user-friendly and has an easily understandable Graphical User Interface (GUI).