Welcome to Powerpivot for Advanced Reporting and Dashboards. This book aims to teach readers on how to use PowerPivot to create advanced reports and prepare dashboards, all from the familiar Excel interface, and how to publish reports using the SharePoint Server. This book will cover all the fundamentals of Business Intelligence and reporting concepts with PowerPivot in the real world. We have prepared five chapters in order to be precise with the PowerPivot technologies; each and every chapter will give you a prominent idea about the PowerPivot tool. At the end of this book, users will be well-versed with PowerPivot tools in order to create advanced reports.
Chapter 1, Principles and Installing PowerPivot, illustrates quick installation of PowerPivot, some of its features, the differences in Excel's 32-bit and 64-bit version of PowerPivot, and vital information about the principles of PowerPivot, which will leverage the user's ability to work on self-service Business Intelligence.
Chapter 2, Preparation Analysis of Data Source, helps users explore ways to prepare data for analysis. Different types of data sources that can be imported into the PowerPivot interface have been described. A general overview of the ETL process has also been given. Users will get to now know how the ETL process works in the PowerPivot interface. An introduction to DAX and its advantages are also explained.
Chapter 3, Data Model, provides the user with clear information about data models' features and fundamental concepts of relationship and hierarchy. The user by now will know how the ETL process is performed in PowerPivot. One of the most important things is the DAX expression and how to use it to make structured data from unstructured data. Finally, the user will learn how to turn data from the heterogeneous type to homogeneous.
Chapter 4, Business Intelligence Solutions Analysis, gives users a great idea about Business Intelligence Solutions Analysis. The user must know the general concepts of BI report creation and how to make an analysis based on the data, and importance of the reports. By now, the user would know how a variety of data sources will appear on one single screen as a dashboard report. By the end of this chapter, the user will have knowledge of business scorecard's, benefits, and a general idea of Perspectives, types of Perspectives, and so on.
Chapter 5, Publishing Reports Using the SharePoint Server, explores the various ways a user can publish and schedule the created PowerPivot report in a SharePoint Server. The user will get more information on deployment of PowerPivot reports.
Basic data analysis and an intermediate level of Excel skills are expected. Familiarity with Pivot Tables is assumed. Basic knowledge of VBA scripting and SharePoint would be useful but not necessary.
The software required are Microsoft Excel 2010 and PowerPivot for Excel add-in, which are mandatory. PowerPivot for SharePoint and SharePoint Server 2010 are not mandatory, as a user can access them remotely on a SharePoint Server that has Excel services and PowerPivot for SharePoint.
This book is ideal for data analysts, reporting and MIS professionals, business analysts, managers, dashboard makers, Business Intelligence professionals, self-service Business Intelligence personnel, and students.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The folder contains five files namely, ContosoSales, Geography, ProductCategories, SQLQuery, and Stores."
A block of code is set as follows:
CONCATENATE (Customer [First_Name], CONCATENATE ("", "", Customer [Last_Name]))New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example appear in the text like this: "Select the language and click on the Download button."
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