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)

Summary


This chapter shows the users how to prepare data for analysis. We also covered different types of data sources that can be imported into the PowerPivot interface. Some information about the provider and a general overview of the ETL process has also been given. Users now know how the ETL process works in the PowerPivot interface; also, users were shown an introduction and the advantages of DAX.

Users have learned how to import different data sources into one PowerPivot workspace. In this chapter, a successful import of two kinds of industry data from different data sources has been shown and explained in detail with each of the functionalities and features of the data source import wizard, connection details, filtering, ignoring unwanted columns, and so on. The user now knows details on data refresh with provided detailed diagrams and screenshots for easy understanding.

In the next chapter, we will cover a brief introduction of the data model and later, a full description of data model...