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

Exploring cube functions in Microsoft Excel

There are currently seven cube functions in Excel. We will take a quick look at five of these functions and then proceed to create examples with each function. We will use the data model we created in our earlier chapter.

Of the seven cube functions, three of them are used often and serve as building blocks for the rest. These are CUBEVALUE, CUBESET, and CUBEMEMBER:

Figure 6.7 – List of cube functions in Microsoft Excel

Figure 6.7 – List of cube functions in Microsoft Excel

The remaining are CUBERANKEDMEMBER, CUBESETCOUNT, CUBEMEMBERPROPERTY, and CUBEKPIMEMBER.

To help you understand how these cube functions work, it is important to know that all the functions work in a similar way by retrieving aggregated values or attributes from the data model, which we will refer to here as a cube.

Because of this, all the functions start with the same argument, "ThisWorkbookDataModel":

Figure 6.8 – Exploring the syntax...