Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint

With PowerPivot, Microsoft brings the power of Microsoft's business intelligence tools to Excel and SharePoint users. Self-service business intelligence today augments traditional BI methods, allowing faster response time and greater flexibility. If you're a business decision-maker who uses Microsoft Office or an IT professional responsible for deploying and managing your organization's business intelligence systems, this guide will help you make the most of PowerPivot.

Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint describes all aspects of PowerPivot and shows you how to use each of its major features. By the time you are finished with this book, you will be well on your way to becoming a PowerPivot expert.

This book is for people who want to learn about PowerPivot from end to end. You should have some rudimentary knowledge of databases and data analysis. Familiarity with Microsoft Excel and Microsoft SharePoint is helpful, since PowerPivot builds on those two products.

This book covers the first version of PowerPivot, which ships with SQL Server 2008 R2 and enhances Microsoft Office 2010. It provides an overview of PowerPivot and a detailed look its two components: PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint. It explains the technologies that make up these two components, and gives some insight into why these components were implemented the way they were. Through an extended example, it shows how to build a PowerPivot application from end to end.

The companion Web site includes all the sample applications and reports discussed.

What This Book Covers

After discussing self-service BI and the motivation for creating PowerPivot, the book presents a quick, end-to-end tutorial showing how to create and publish a simple PowerPivot application. It then drilsl into the features of PowerPivot for Excel in detail and, in the process, builds a more complex PowerPivot application based on a real-world case study. Finally, it discusses the server side of PowerPivot (PowerPivot for SharePoint) and provides detailed information about its installation and maintenance.

Chapter 1, "Self-Service Business Intelligence and Microsoft PowerPivot," begins Part I of the book. This chapter describes self-service BI and introduces PowerPivot, Microsoft's first self-service BI tool. It provides a high-level look at the two components that make up PowerPivot - PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint.

Chapter 2, "A First Look at PowerPivot," walks you through a simple example of creating a PowerPivot application from end to end. In the process, it shows how to set up the two components of PowerPivot, and describes the normal workflow of creating a simple PowerPivot application.

Chapter 3, "Assembling Data," starts off Part II of the book, and explains how to bring data into PowerPivot from various external data ...