Excel PowerPivot

What is PowerPivot?

Microsoft Office is one of the flagship software products. It is mainly a collection of software applications that are required by ‘an office environment’ in small and medium businesses or in large enterprises. Probably the only software that is most widely known, used and familiar with.

It is a collection of office applications known as software suite. Main components of this Microsoft Office suite are: a word processing or writing facility, a spreadsheet, a presentation preparation utility. Let us consider only the ‘spreadsheet’ part of it. A spreadsheet is an application that organizes data in rows and columns; one of the simple ways of presenting information. Microsoft Excel, the spreadsheet in the Office Suite remains as one of the powerful software application. Microsoft Office latest release is called Office 2010. In the Office 2010, Excel program, a new feature has been introduced and this is called PowerPivot. This is one of the recent developments that pave way for Self- Service BI solutions. According to Microsoft:

‘PowerPivot gives users the power to create compelling self-service BI solutions, facilitates sharing and collaboration on user-generated BI solutions in a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment, and enables IT organizations to increase operational efficiencies through Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2-based management tools.’

This PowerPivot feature simply equips the user, who need not be BI or IT Professional, with data analyzing capacity with millions of rows of data.

What PowerPivot does in the BI space?

We know that even the most powerful Business Intelligence tools are not utilized fully. On the other hand, even the most powerful tools, sometimes lacks the capacity to provide simple analytical reports to the user. In this scenario, PowerPivot provides the power to analyze and report millions of data. In some cases at least, this can do the same function as done by some specialist BI tools. There is chance in any organization that, there are people who are doing or involved in analyzing data and reporting, but, they are not known as doing BI function. We are seeing a lot of people using excel in day to day office working. PowerPivot being part of excel reaches these people. PowerPivot can pull data from a variety of connected sources. In most cases, it is linked to Microsoft SQL Server, which is an RDBMS – Relational Data Base Management System. The data source can even be internet or web. User can pull into Excel large amounts of data from multiple database tables, databases or other sources of data, and sort and filter them almost instantly. Yes, Instantly. In most cases, analyzing these data job is done the moment we click the mouse. Data can be reorganized around one column or compared against columns from another data source. User can divide the data by time, geographic origin or some other parameter. Since it runs Microsoft’s business intelligence software on the back end, it can do much of what a full-fledged BI application can do.

We encourage the readers to test drive PowerPivot available in Microsoft Office Excel 2010 and get the benefits translated to your simple data analysis and reporting needs.