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)

Chapter 2. Preparation Analysis of Data Source

After installing PowerPivot and getting to know the basic concepts, we will now take a deep dive into data sources and the different types of data sources that can be imported to the PowerPivot interface.

As discussed in Chapter 1, Principles and Installing PowerPivot, there are three principles in PowerPivot; the first principle is Preparation, which is displayed in a red colored box in the following figure:

Preparation for data analysis

The most important thing is that a lot of users may have both structured and unstructured data coming from a variety of sources (for their urgent data analysis). The usage of the DAX formula in PowerPivot will solve this heterogeneous problem. Examples explaining the structured and unstructured data are given in the General Overview of ETL section of this chapter.

Note

The Microsoft Excel 2010 PowerPivot add-in is being used for our practical purposes and the screenshots are explained too. There is no comparable...