Overview of PowerPivot

Business users, and in particular business analysts, need to be able to process data to do their job. Much of that data processing responsibility goes through the IT department, but for a number of reasons, business users also need to be able to access and analyze data on their own. As a result, Microsoft Excel has become an indispensable tool for business.

However, although Excel is a powerful data tool, standard Excel has some limitations when it comes to large datasets. Also, when you want to combine different datasets in Excel, it’s possible, but difficult and not very efficient. Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that could process literally millions of rows of data, do so extremely quickly, enable you to create relationships between different sets of data, and do all this in a familiar user interface? Well, that is PowerPivot!