It also includes a CSV file with all our customers and their details, and one with all our product details. This includes a CSV file of all sales transactions for a specified time period. Let's imagine a scenario where we export sales data from our database. Let’s look at an example business use case to see where Power Pivot will help us and I'll explain how to use PowerPivot in this case. So what is Power Pivot? It is really a combination of using PivotTables and DAX calculations with the internal data model of Excel for analysis of big data.Ĭheck out this short video that explains why we need Power Pivot: The DAX language is vast and enables us to perform more complex calculations than we can do with a standard PivotTable. This stands for Data Analysis Expressions. You can also use a powerful formula language in Power Pivot called DAX. We can then create PivotTables based on this model to analyze multiple tables of data. No more VLOOKUPs to pull data together into one big list.

Relationships can then be created between the different tables of data. It does this by loading the data into the internal data model of Excel and not onto a worksheet.

Power Pivot enables us to work with big data beyond the 1,048,576 limitation and still produce smaller, leaner and faster workbooks than a standard PivotTable. In reality, it can struggle as you get to 100,000 or even before that depending on what you have in your workbook. Although an Excel worksheet can handle 1,048,576 rows of data.

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