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 sources. It also introduces the extended example that you will build in this and subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4, "Enriching Data," shows how to enhance the data you brought into your application by creating relationships and using PowerPivot's expression language, Data Analysis Expressions (DAX).

Chapter 5, "Self-Service Analysis," describes how to use your PowerPivot data with various Excel features, such as PivotTables, PivotCharts, and slicers to do analysis. Chapter 5 also delves further into DAX, showing how to create and use DAX measures.

Chapter 6, "Self-Service Reporting," shows how to publish your PowerPivot workbook to the server side of PowerPivot (PowerPivot for SharePoint), and make use of its features to view and update PowerPivot reports. It also shows how to use the data in a PowerPivot workbook as a data source for reports created in other tools such as Report Builder 3.0 and Excel.

Chapter 7, "Preparing for SharePoint 2010," is the first chapter in Part III of the book. It describes the components of SharePoint 2010 that are relevant for PowerPivot, and looks at how PowerPivot for SharePoint interacts with those components.

Chapter 8, "PowerPivot for SharePoint Setup and Configuration," provides instructions on how to set up and configure a multi-machine SharePoint farm that contains PowerPivot for SharePoint.

Chapter 9, "Troubleshooting, Monitoring, and Securing PowerPivot Services," gives tips on how to troubleshoot PowerPivot for SharePoint issues. It also shows how to monitor the health of your PowerPivot for SharePoint environment, and discusses relevant security issues.

Chapter 10, "Diving into the PowerPivot Architecture," describes at a deeper level the architecture of PowerPivot, both client and server. It also explains the Windows Identity Foundation and discusses the use of Kerberos in the context of PowerPivot for SharePoint.

Chapter 11, "Enterprise Considerations," talks about common PowerPivot for SharePoint enterprise considerations: capacity planning, optimizing the environment, upgrade considerations, and uploading performance.

Appendix A provides instructions for setting up the data sources that are used to build the SDR Healthcare extended example in Chapters 3 through 6.

Additionally, two "bonus" elements are available online at this book's companion Web site:
* Appendix B is a comprehensive DAX reference that describes all the DAX functions and provides code snippets that show how to use them.
* A special chapter describes real-world scenarios in which PowerPivot is used to solve common problems.