New features in Power Pivot 2010: Revolutionize data analysis
1. New features in Power Pivot 2010
Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is a new technology aimed at providing self-service Business
Intelligence (BI).
PowerPivot is a real revolution inside the world of data analysis because it gives you all the power you
need to perform complex analysis of data without requiring the intervention of BI technicians.
This tool, an Excel add-in, is a simple replacement for the PivotTable and implements a powerful in-
memory database that can organize data, detect interesting relationships, and give you a swift way to
browse information.
Standard Excel Pivot and PowerPivot
PivotTables and PivotCharts are the primary ways to analyze and present the large volumes of IB data in
Excel. With self-service BI using PowerPivot, this is still true. PowerPivot includes its own PivotTable field
list that is customized to effectively work with the new PowerPivot data model, which is built around
tables, relationships, rather than dimensions and cubes, as is found in traditional corporate BI.
1. The ability to organize tables for the PivotTable tool in a relational way, freeing
the analyst from the need to import data as Excel worksheets before analyzing
the data.
Standard Excel pivot tables can work on a single table; PowerPivot on the other hand, lets you
work on many tables, tied together through relationships.
Excel Pivot Field list and PowerPivot Field list
The PowerPivot field list doesn't have a drop-down menu that enables you to pick how and
what the field list will display.
The PowerPivot filed list doesn't have a drop-down list for filtering based on measure
groups.
The PowerPivot field list does have a search box that allows you to search based on table
and column names.
The list of available fields differs between the two field lists. Excel's PivotTable field list
shows fields based on the traditional OLAP model of measures, dimensions, and key
performance indicators (KPIs), whereas the PowerPivot field list shows fields as tables and
columns.
The PowerPivot field list has two additional drop zones, Slicers Vertical and Slicers
Horizontal.
The PowerPivot field list doesn't have support for deferring layout updates.
2. Excel Pivot Slicer and PowerPivot Slicer
Slicers are an exciting new feature in Excel 2010 that PowerPivot make even better. At the
PivotTable level of a workbook. But Excel PivotTable has single slicer, PowerPivot has Slicer
Vertical and Slicer Horizontal, to make slicers easier and faster to work.
Excel Pivot Slicer
3. PowerPivot Slicer
2. The availability of a fast, space-saving columnar database that can handle huge
amounts of data without the limitations of Excel worksheets.
PowerPivot is a database, so it can store huge amounts of data; Excel is a spreadsheet, and its
reason for being is to make computations, not to store data.
3. DAX, a powerful programming language that defines complex expressions on
top of the relational database.
DAX measures provide the capability to create powerful analytic calculations beyond that is
possible in Excel. Because PowerPivot workbooks are also Excel workbooks, most Excel features
used for data analysis are also available when working with PowerPivot data. DAX allows you to
define surprisingly rich expressions, compared to those that are standard in Excel.
4. Amazingly fast in-memory processing of complex queries over the whole
database.
4. 5. The ability to integrate different sources and almost any kind of data, such as
information from databases, Excel worksheets, and sources available on the
Internet.
There are some benefits of PowerPivot in SharePoint:
It gives our customers the quickest possible lead times – no installation requirements
It gives us a means to keep everything up to date, nightly
It eliminates user data download requirements – a web app is a lot better than
downloading a 2 GB workbook every day.
It allows us to protect our core IP – some of our measures and views are truly firsts in
the target industries, and the ways in which we implement those, from the backend up
through pixels, are something we can lock down via in-browser delivery.
Excel Services and PowerPivot
The reason we compare Excel Service and PowerPivot is because of PowerPivot's strong
dependency on Excel in general. As noted earlier, PowerPivot for Excel (the client component of
PowerPivot) is an add-in to the Excel 2010 client. PowerPivot for Excel augments and provides
additional functionality to what already exists within Excel.
Example, Figure below shows an Excel workbook that presents Healthcare Audit information.
5. Excel service shows the same report as below:
Within Excel Services, you can able to make use of slicers and filtering to customize your views
of data. Formatting between client and server is kept the same, including the conditional
formatting of the numeric values. But an important function that is lacking in Excel Service is the
PowerPivot Field List. This is an important difference, because this provides the capability to add
different attributes such as slicers, labels, or values, and, ultimately, the capability to alter the
entire look, feel, and, most important, meaning of the report.