Professional Microsoft® PowerPivot for Excel® and SharePoint®

Chapter 3. Assembling Data

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Importing data into PowerPivot

• Understanding other ways of bringing data into PowerPivot

• Introducing the healthcare audit application

• Assembling data for the healthcare audit application

BI applications (including self-service BI applications) are all about making sense of data. In order to make sense of it, you must start with the data. This chapter is about this aspect of building PowerPivot applications — assembling the data you will analyze and/or report on.

Unlike the common corporate BI approach, where you assemble all your data into a data warehouse and then import it into your online analytical processing (OLAP) database, PowerPivot strives to make it easy to bring data into the application directly from many different data sources without bringing it first into an intermediate staging area. This allows a more interactive, exploratory approach to BI that is one of the hallmarks of self-service BI.

Keep in mind that self-service BI is an alternative to, not a replacement for, corporate BI. There are contexts where the traditional corporate BI approach is the right one. Two examples are analyzing massive quantities of data or using the full power of Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) if the calculation requirements of your application require it.

This doesn't mean that the data that lives in data warehouses or in corporate BI databases can't be used in self-service BI applications. Data from these types of applications is included ...