It is important to understand what PowerPivot is and how it relates to Power View. PowerPivot is a data analysis add-on for Microsoft Excel. With it, you can mash large amounts of data together that you can then analyze and aggregate all in one workbook, bypassing the Excel maximum worksheet size of one million rows. It uses a powerful data engine to analyze and query large volumes of data very quickly. There are many data sources that you can use to import data into PowerPivot. Once the data is imported, it becomes part of a data model, which is simply a collection of tables that have relationships between them. Since the data is in Excel, it is immediately available to PivotTables, PivotCharts, and Power View.

PowerPivot is implemented in an application window separate from Excel that gives you the ability to do such things as insert and delete columns, format text, hide columns from client tools, change column names, and add images. Once you complete your changes, you have the...