Professional Microsoft® PowerPivot for Excel® and SharePoint®

Chapter 2. A First Look at PowerPivot

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Setting up and installing PowerPivot for Excel

• Using the Contoso sample database

• Importing data

• Enriching data

• Creating PivotTables/PivotCharts

• Setting up and installing PowerPivot for SharePoint

• Sharing PowerPivot workbooks

• Viewing workbooks in PowerPivot Gallery

In Chapter 1, you learned about the evolution of business intelligence (BI) and the shift to self-service analytics. Microsoft PowerPivot helps you to perform self-service analytics for the information producer and the information consumer. At the same time, PowerPivot provides the essentials for your IT department administrators to monitor and plan for enhancing the infrastructure based on usage.

As you learned in Chapter 1, PowerPivot contains two main components — an add-in for Excel 2010 (which helps you to work with Excel workbooks and components that integrate with Microsoft Office) and enhancements to SharePoint Server 2010 (which help you to view/analyze data in the PowerPivot workbooks efficiently, as well as monitor the usage of workbooks). As mentioned in Chapter 1, in this chapter and subsequent chapters, the PowerPivot add-in for Excel 2010 will be called PowerPivot for Excel, and the component integrating with SharePoint Server 2010 will be called PowerPivot for SharePoint.

This chapter first familiarizes you with Power Pivot for Excel and some of its key features by working through a tutorial based on a sample relational database for SQL Server Analysis ...