It’s basically Access or SQL, but for the masses of people who are familiar with Excel.ĭata can be brought in using a variety of methods and from a wide range of sources.

The time required in establishing relationships, and allows you to get the answers that you’re looking for faster than ever before. Power Pivot essentially removes the need to have risky links between spreadsheets, reduces Power Pivot is a “new” tool in Excel that was introduced into certain shelf versions of Excel from 2013 onwards, and has been a downloadable add-on for Excel 2010 for some time before that. Often, manual tools are employed to take and transform data across spreadsheets and consolidate these into a single table to be pivoted.Įnter Power Pivot. Wouldn’t it be great if you could do all of that in Excel? A conventional PivotTable has the ability to generate some insights, but is typically restricted to just a single table or source of data, meaning that companies would still need some database tool such as Access or SQL to get the right data before you could analyze Whether you have previously used cubes, SQL databases, SAP dashboards, or any combination of the above, it typically requires a large investment setting upĪppropriate reporting tools, and paying a consultant or an expensive IT team to help you maintain and make updates to the system. These sorts of insights and analyses have historically been the domain of bespoke accounting software packages and customized internal systems. Tomorrow will be an interesting day for Richard’s empire as well, as he takes the insights from his Power Pivot-driven dashboards and restructures his business accordingly. Richard could also see that profitability across certain key stores was particularly strong, but that they were subsidizing other retail platforms that were unprofitable and had no strategic purpose, other than cannibalizing sales from profitable stores. Which drove margins down further (a very bad thing).

From his dashboards, he could see that sales were up (a good thing), but the product mix was skewing away from his higher margin products (a bad thing), and were entirely purchased using discount codes and other similar “special” prices, Yesterday was an interesting day for Richard’s retail empire. This is the first article in a series relating to Microsoft’s Power BI suite of programs (not to be mistaken for Power BI, the software, but definitely related).

Power pivot excel 2013