Using PowerPivot

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Using PowerPivot

Matthew Cushing

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August 6, 2010 at 8:23 am

#227515

I understand how to get data into a powerpivot excel workbook, my question is what do I do with it?
I've got an application where we track surveys and penalties associated with them. I import all the data into a powerpivot spreadsheet, but when I go to start playing with it, I'm not really sure what to do with it.
Trying to give our users some useful data, but I don't know how to get started. Do I create month(dateEntered) and year(dateEntered) columns so I can use them in the columns for the pivot?
Do I need a primer on how to create and use Pivot tables?
any suggestions would be appreciated.

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stevefromOZ SSC-Forever Points: 43646 More actions · Answer 1

Matt,

Hope I'm not telling you things you already know, if so, apologies and I prob need to understand the question better...

Basically, the PowerPivot window is generating a repository that's like a cube and the way you then access this is back in Excel.

So, assuming you've opened excel, gone to Powerpivot and imported 'everything', you then save and can close the PowerPivot window. So, now back in Excel, using the PowerPivot ribbon, click the PivotTable button and select what sort of reporting object you want to use (eg pivot table, pivot chart, 2 charts, 4 charts etc ). When you do this, the pivot data you imported is available to you in the pivot table. From there you can add slicers, rows, cols etc.

Thing to note, if you try and use the Pivot Table from the Insert ribbon, it won't reference the PowerPivot data.

HTH,

Steve.

Matthew Cushing SSCrazy Points: 2898 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks Steve. I decided to play around with some stuff while I was waiting for an answer and realized a lot of the stuff that was baffling me before.

Started using Slicers? Duuuuude, WAY too cool 🙂

Thanks for the tip, I saw that pivot table button and I wasn't sure.

stevefromOZ SSC-Forever Points: 43646 More actions · Answer 3

Glad you got it sorted 🙂

I agree, Slicers are cool. You can use these in 'standard' excel 2010 pivot tables too.

Not sure if you're aware but you can do quite a bit with Powerpivot using DAX in both calculated columns (so in the powerpivot 'tables') and also measures. The cols become attributes (ie like dimensional members) and the measures, well, they obv become measures.

Steve.