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

DAX as a calculated column or measure

After creating our data model, we need to calculate some key numbers to track performance. There are some basic calculations we can create from the columns with values in our data model, using functions such as SUM, AVERAGE, MAX, MIN, and so on.

For example, we can find the total quantity of products sold by summing all the values in the Quantity column of our Main Transaction table.

There are measures we can create by simply dragging existing columns or fields to the Values section of a PivotTable. These measures are called implicit measures, while the ones we create with formulas that can be accessed and reused in any part of our data model are called explicit measures. Explicit measures can be created using DAX. DAX is the formula language of a data model. In the data model, we can create two types of DAX calculations: calculated columns and measures.

In an earlier chapter, we learned how to create calculated columns. In this chapter...