PowerPivot

Power Pivot is a free add-in to the 2010 version of the spreadsheet application Microsoft Excel. In Excel 2013, Power Pivot is only available for certain versions of Office.^[1] It extends the capabilities of the PivotTable data summarisation and cross-tabulation feature with new features such as expanded data capacity, advanced calculations, ability to import data from multiple sources, and the ability to publish the workbooks as interactive web applications.^[2] As such, Power Pivot falls under Microsoft's Business Intelligence offering, complementing it with its self-service, in-memory capabilities.

Prior to the release of Power Pivot, Microsoft relied heavily on SQL Server Analysis Services as the engine for its Business Intelligence suite. PowerPivot complements the SQL Server core BI components under the vision of one Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM), which aims to integrate on-disk multidimensional analytics previously known as Unified Dimensional Model, or UDM, with a more flexible, in-memory "tabular" model.

As a self-service BI product, Power Pivot is intended to allow users with no specialised BI or analytics training to develop data models and calculations, sharing them either directly or through SharePoint document libraries.

As part of the July 8, 2013 announcement of the new "Power BI" suite of self-service tools, Microsoft renamed PowerPivot as "Power Pivot" in order to match the naming convention of other tools in the suite.^[3]

Key Features

• Warehousing analytics and Business Intelligence within Excel - A local Analysis Services VertiPaq engine that compresses and loads data and makes it available to data visualization objects, such as PivotTables, in a worksheet. Sort and filter are sped up by performing operations with a local Analysis Services VertiPaq processor.^[4]
• Support for a variety of datasources - Provides the foundation to load and combine source data from any location for mass data analysis on the desktop, including relational databases, multidimensional sources, cloud services, data feeds, Excel files, text files, and data from the Web.^[5]
• SharePoint Integration - Enables users to share data models and analysis with the solutions in SharePoint; users can configure refresh cycles to ensure the data remains current automatically.^[6]
• Power Pivot allows creating portable and reusable data; data stays inside the workbook. Users do not have to manage external data connections. The user has a single workbook (.xlsx) file that contains embedded data extracted and processed by an internal processor, but rendered exclusively through Excel.
• When users publish, move, copy, or share a workbook, all the data is transported inclusively; saved data is stored inside the Excel workbook.
• Once the data is loaded, the user can work in disconnected mode – no further connectivity is required to any server.
• The maximum file size of a Power Pivot workbook is 2 GB on disk and 4 GB in memory. File compression reduces the amount of disk space required to save a workbook, with typical ratios being 1:10 disk-to-memory or greater.^[7][8]
• Support for Data Analysis eXpressions, which allow users to perform analytical calculations. DAX includes functions dealing with time intelligence, data aggregation and statistical calculations in general.

References