Introducing PowerPivot

If you've ever tried to create a PivotTable from a file containing hundreds of thousands of rows of data, you might have noticed some performance issues. PowerPivot, a new technology introduced alongside Excel 2010, uses advanced data handling techniques to let you manipulate large data sets more efficiently. In this movie, I will give you an overview of how to analyze data in PowerPivot and then later in this chapter we will dive into specifics of bringing data into PowerPivot. So this is what a PowerPivot datasheet looks like. I have several different columns of data. As you can see at the bottom left-hand corner this PowerPivot data set contains over 964,000 rows.

Now normally in Excel that would take a lot of time to work with, but let's say that I want to filter it so that I only show orders of Quantity 14. So I can click the filter arrow and create my filter. Click OK and Excel filters the rows and you can see we're down to just under 50,000. Creating another filter, say for store number one, limits the data even further. Now we are down under 500. And then I will just clear the filters.

As you can see, working with large data sets within PowerPivot happens much more quickly than it would if you were just using a regular PivotTable and an Excel worksheet. So now let's create a PivotTable off of this data, and I'll just create it here in my workbook, and then just as filtering that data happens much more quickly in PowerPivot than it would in Excel, I can create a PivotTable even with this massive data set much more quickly within PowerPivot. So I'll just put my StoreID in Row Labels, the Year in the Column Labels, and Total order in the Values area, and there is my data.

Again, over 960,000 rows summarized just that quickly. The technology behind PowerPivot lets you manage large datasets much more efficiently than is possible using conventional PivotTables. In the next couple of movies I'll show you how to install PowerPivot, bring your data in, and then work with it.