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Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is a free data analysis add-in that allows you to manipulate and analyse large sets of data, from multiple sources, with ease. As a business intelligence application, PowerPivot integrates with many data sources to help you gain better business insights.

So what can you do with Microsoft PowerPivot?

  1. Work with 100s of millions of rows of data – The PowerPivot add-in allows you to work with much more data than you could with just Excel.
  2. Pull data from multiple sources and combine them – With PowerPivot you can import data from almost anywhere including relational databases, multidimensional sources, cloud services, data feeds, Excel files, text files, and the web.
  3. Create relationships between the imported data and analyse it using familiar Excel tools – PowerPivot allows you to easily create relationships and analyse all your data using the tools you already know like PivotTables, PivotCharts, and slicers.
  4. Use new DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) Formulas– The new DAX formulas in PowerPivot are specifically optimized for business intelligence use.
  5. Publish to SharePoint – If you use SharePoint 2010 you can publish your analysis so others in your organisation can see it and to continue to slice and dice the data.

Here at LANcom we use PowerPivot to analyse data pulled from our professional services automation system and our IT monitoring software, and we have found it to be very useful.

For the best results when using PowerPivot you will need the 64-bit version of Excel 2010, but it is still possible to use it with the 32-bit version. If you would like to learn more about PowerPivot click here to visit the website.