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.