Microsoft Excel 2013: Building Data Models with PowerPivot

Your guide to quickly turn data into results.

Transform your skills, data, and business—and create your own BI solutions using software you already know and love: Microsoft Excel. Two business intelligence (BI) experts take you inside PowerPivot functionality for Excel® 2013, with a focus on real world scenarios, problem-solving, and data modeling. You’ll learn how to quickly turn mass quantities of data into meaningful information and on-the-job results—no programming required!

• Understand the differences between PowerPivot for Self Service BI and SQL Server Analysis Services for Corporate BI
• Extend your existing data-analysis skills to create your own BI solutions
• Quickly manipulate large data sets, often in millions of rows
• Perform simple-to-sophisticated calculations and what-if analysis
• Create complex reporting systems with data modeling and Data Analysis Expressions
• Share your results effortlessly across your organization using Microsoft SharePoint®

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

There is a certain niche audience for this book: intermediate to advanced excel users who aren’t necessarily BI/datawarehousing types. If you are a fairly basic excel user, this would not be a book to start with. You should already know vlookups, pivot tables, etc. before getting into PowerPivot. And, if you are a grizzled BI professional, this may serve as a good reference, but you can breeze through parts of it.

I got this book as part of the PowerPivot workshop that Marco and Alberto teach. I am about half-way through the book now, and I am at the point where I am starting to re-read chapters to make sure I fully understand the concepts. The material is dense with facts and examples, and the book will take you from 0 to 60 in the first few pages, especially if you have not had a lot of PowerPivot exposure prior to this.

I haven’t gotten through the entire book yet, but I’ve been using it as a resource in my position where I’m currently an avid Excel user. Alberto and Marco have covered the full spectrum of what you can do with Powerpivot and provide a wealth of information on how to form and shape your data model for best use in reporting and analytics. I would highly recommend this book if you’re getting started with Powerpivot.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction to PowerPivot
Chapter 2 Using the unique features of PowerPivot
Chapter 3 Introducing DAX
Chapter 4 Understanding data models
Chapter 5 Publishing to SharePoint
Chapter 6 Loading data
Chapter 7 Understanding evaluation contexts
Chapter 8 Understanding CALCULATE
Chapter 9 Using hierarchies
Chapter 10 Using Power View
Chapter 11 Shaping the reports
Chapter 12 Performing date calculations in DAX
Chapter 13 Using advanced DAX
Chapter 14 Using DAX as a query language
Chapter 15 Automating operations using VBA
Chapter 16 Comparing Excel and SQL Server Analysis Services
Appendix About the Authors