PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010 Tutorials
Here we will list great tutorials on various aspects of PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010 for our community members. Feel free to send a comment if you find a great tutorial to share with the community.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Release date of PowerPivot for Excel CTP3
The release date of PowerPivot for Excel CTP3 is scheduled for Thursday November 18th, 2009. It will be posted on http://www.powerpivot.com.
We're excited to get our hands on this new tool set.
We're excited to get our hands on this new tool set.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
What is PowerPivot? BI to the People
PowerPivot is a new Excel 2010 feature meant to help Excel users build reports and analyze data like never before. Previous versions of Excel were not able to manage much data. In a native excel spreadsheet, there is a row limit of 65K or so.
PowerPivot uses high-tech data compression so working with 10 Million rows at a time is possible and manageable. Imagine Sorting a column when working with that many rows. Well, with PowerPivot, that is possible.
In addition to working with a lot of rows, PowerPivot adds interactive reporting. These reports can then be shared with others using Microsoft SharePoint. No, you wouldn't want to try to email a report based on 10 Million rows. That's where SharePoint comes in. SharePoint can move that data to the application server and efficiently share the reports.
The mantra is BI to the People. Now a broader array of collaborators can build and share reports based on large datasets without having to go directly to database programmers and other IT staff for the data. The data doesn't have to originate within the organization. The data can come from the Internet and other data stores.
PowerPivot uses high-tech data compression so working with 10 Million rows at a time is possible and manageable. Imagine Sorting a column when working with that many rows. Well, with PowerPivot, that is possible.
In addition to working with a lot of rows, PowerPivot adds interactive reporting. These reports can then be shared with others using Microsoft SharePoint. No, you wouldn't want to try to email a report based on 10 Million rows. That's where SharePoint comes in. SharePoint can move that data to the application server and efficiently share the reports.
The mantra is BI to the People. Now a broader array of collaborators can build and share reports based on large datasets without having to go directly to database programmers and other IT staff for the data. The data doesn't have to originate within the organization. The data can come from the Internet and other data stores.
Welcome to PowerPivot Help
Welcome to PowerPivot Help. Our goal is to collect valuable tips, help on PowerPivot errors, and so forth to help with your PowerPivot projects, and to create a place where you can help create a community around PowerPivot. Please visit and consider adding your tips and comments here for others to enjoy.
Thank you,
Editorial Staff, PowerPivotHelp Blog.
Thank you,
Editorial Staff, PowerPivotHelp Blog.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
PowerPivot at 2009 SQL Server PASS Conference
At the Professional Association of SQL Server conference, November 2009, Denny Lee and Dave Wickert, Members of the Microsoft PowerPivot teams and SQLCAT teams, made a presentation about PowerPivot server best practices.
You can follow tweets at www.twitter.com/powerpivot.
PowerPivot is the only Microsoft product that spans across the SQL Server, SharePoint and Office product stacks.
There are two categories of users for PowerPivot. There are "power users" and "standard users." Standard users can use a browser. They don't have to have Excel installed to look at PowerPivot reports.
With the PowerPivot add-in, a 2010 Excel power user can build reports. Behind the scenes, there is VertiPack compression and an Analysis Services engine in-memory. The takeaway, now Excel can work with a lot more data than ever before - and that opens up the door to do more business intelligence data analysis. Power users can gather data from databases and work in Excel rather than within the database where their skillset does not reside.
One trick is to remove rows that are not used to improve performance.
VertiPac is an in-memory system. PowerPivot keeps a cache of detatched databases in the SSAS Backup folder.
So, the recommendation is setting up new application servers rather than trying to repurpose older servers because these days one can get a server loaded up with a lot of memory relatively cheaply.
PowerPivot stores a copy of the database. A fair amount of disk space is used to minimize the load on content databases arising from multiple users hitting the database.
You can follow tweets at www.twitter.com/powerpivot.
PowerPivot is the only Microsoft product that spans across the SQL Server, SharePoint and Office product stacks.
There are two categories of users for PowerPivot. There are "power users" and "standard users." Standard users can use a browser. They don't have to have Excel installed to look at PowerPivot reports.
With the PowerPivot add-in, a 2010 Excel power user can build reports. Behind the scenes, there is VertiPack compression and an Analysis Services engine in-memory. The takeaway, now Excel can work with a lot more data than ever before - and that opens up the door to do more business intelligence data analysis. Power users can gather data from databases and work in Excel rather than within the database where their skillset does not reside.
One trick is to remove rows that are not used to improve performance.
VertiPac is an in-memory system. PowerPivot keeps a cache of detatched databases in the SSAS Backup folder.
So, the recommendation is setting up new application servers rather than trying to repurpose older servers because these days one can get a server loaded up with a lot of memory relatively cheaply.
PowerPivot stores a copy of the database. A fair amount of disk space is used to minimize the load on content databases arising from multiple users hitting the database.
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