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)

A data model in PowerPivot


Preparation of data for analysis has been done, but for full and meaningful analysis relationships have to be created between the tables that were imported from different data sources. By creating a relationship, integration of columns, creation of attribute formats, metrics, and calculation of columns using DAX for our analysis and advanced reporting can be done as per the requirements. One of the prominent things here is that a hierarchy can be created based on these attributes. So finally the logical design of the PowerPivot interface will be based on the star schema, the snowflake schema, or the constellation schema. After all these processes in the PowerPivot interface are completed, it will fulfill the third principle of integration and aggregation. The extract, transform, and load (ETL) process and DAX functional feature have already been discussed and this will help a lot in designing the data model.

The importation of the data of two industries for the...