Book Image

Data Modeling with Microsoft Excel

By : Bernard Obeng Boateng
5 (1)
Book Image

Data Modeling with Microsoft Excel

5 (1)
By: Bernard Obeng Boateng

Overview of this book

Microsoft Excel's BI solutions have evolved, offering users more flexibility and control over analyzing data directly in Excel. Features like PivotTables, Data Model, Power Query, and Power Pivot empower Excel users to efficiently get, transform, model, aggregate, and visualize data. Data Modeling with Microsoft Excel offers a practical way to demystify the use and application of these tools using real-world examples and simple illustrations. This book will introduce you to the world of data modeling in Excel, as well as definitions and best practices in data structuring for both normalized and denormalized data. The next set of chapters will take you through the useful features of Data Model and Power Pivot, helping you get to grips with the types of schemas (snowflake and star) and create relationships within multiple tables. You’ll also understand how to create powerful and flexible measures using DAX and Cube functions. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to apply the acquired knowledge in real-world scenarios and build an interactive dashboard that will help you make important decisions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1: Overview and Introduction to Data Modeling in Microsoft Excel
6
Part 2: Creating Insightful Calculations from your Data Model using DAX and Cube Functions
9
Part 3: Putting it all together with a Dashboard

Inserting slicers for interaction

We have now created all the primary components of our dashboard. At this point, the visuals are not formatted, and they are only flat displays without any interaction.

To bring in some interaction, we will insert slicers to help users dice and slice to bring out some insights from these charts.

We can insert the slicers directly from the data model. To do that, go to Insert > Slicer > Data Model.

Figure 8.55 – Inserting slicers for interaction

Figure 8.55 – Inserting slicers for interaction

This should bring up all the tables in our data model.

For this dashboard, we want users to slice using Year from the Calendar table and Region from the Location table.

This should bring up the two slicers:

Figure 8.56 – Aligning your slicers

Figure 8.56 – Aligning your slicers

We can split the buttons into columns representing the number of items we have in each slicer. So, we set 6 columns for the Year slicer and 10 for the Region slicer. You can always...