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Product Description
Product Description
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.
From the Back Cover
With PowerPivot, Microsoft brings the strength of Microsoft′s Business Intelligence (BI) toolset to Excel and PowerPoint users. Authoredby members of the Microsoft team behind the creation of PowerPivot, this book shows you how to use PowerPivot for Excel to create compelling BI solutions, perform data analysis, and achieve unique business insight. You′ll learn how to use PowerPivot for SharePoint to share your BI solutions and collaborate with others. And your organization will learn how to use SQL Server 2008 R2 management tools to acheive more efficient results.
Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint:
Shows how to use PowerPivot for Excel to generate rich and interactive analysis solutions
Explores different ways to bring data into PowerPivot
Addresses sharing and collaborating on user–generated BI solutions in a SharePoint Server 2010 environment
Shows you how to troubleshoot, monitor, and secure PowerPivot services
Demonstrates how PowerPivot can meet the needs of Office, as well as how IT professionals can deploy and manage the self–service business intelligence system
Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real–world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.
wrox.com
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Customer Reviews
Didn't know too much about PowerPivot beforehand but the book has proved very useful in helping me get to grips with this technology. Its well written, with just the right level of technical detail together with useful insights into some of the thinking behind the technology - there's plenty of helpful screenshots too.
A good book to work through, using the sample healthcare database provided.
Would definitely recommend
What the book is NOT
1) It is not the first book an Excel pro should pick up. It covers too much, and comes from a perspective that might seem a bit foreign. Start with Bill's book if this is your background.
2) Like Bill's book, it is only a light treatment of DAX. Again, this is wise, because DAX really deserves its own book. Those seeking a detailed DAX book should look forward to an upcoming title from Marco Russo.
3) It does not cover the real-world gotchas encountered in a full adoption of a PowerPivot system. After a full year of applying PowerPivot to real-world problems - six months as a product team member in exile (in Cleveland), and the last six months putting the full system into action at Pivotstream, I can say that there are a number of "gotchas" that you have to look out for in PowerPivot v1. They are not fatal - Pivotstream's PowerPivot platform is very much thriving - but you only discover them, and learn to avoid/overcome them, via real-world practice.
Anyway, for a just-released product, it's not like we can expect ANY book to cover that kind of thing. There's probably room for a book like "PowerPivot in the Trenches" but someone else needs to volunteer, as I, um, rarely get out of my trench :)
What the book IS - Consistently readable and info-rich
1) Great Information Density, but High Readability - When I finished the book, I immediately dropped an email to Denny/Ron/Siva and told them how impressed I was with the balance between density and clarity. As a de facto tech writer myself throughout my career, I can say that I struggle with this, and typically end up jamming in too much at the expense of readability, or a 50-page doc with so much whitespace that 20 pages would have covered it. Perhaps you have noticed.
It's hard to put my finger on how the book strikes such a nice balance - perhaps it's the editing, or the layout style - but I consistently noted how MUCH was conveyed on each page, while at the same time, it felt like a light read. That's saying a lot considering the list of topics covered.
2) Benefits of Three Product Team Authors - When you include all of the folks from teams like SharePoint, Excel, SSRS and others that contributed to PowerPivot, it's probably safe to say that the product reflects the efforts of 200+ people for several years. No one human being could possibly span all of that, and it only gets harder if you weren't directly involved in that process.
These three guys were working on the book for a long time, while the product was still in development. They all had different areas of focus, both in terms of natural affinities and in terms of dividing up their assignments. They then had a lot of time, and access to the people who were building the product, to refine the content.
The benefits of this authorship approach are evident in the book. You'll see what I mean - I always expect some "uneveness" in a tech book of this length because the talents and endurance of a single author are themselves uneven. Chapter to chapter, the red book's quality remains consistent.
Overall Recommendation
If you fit any of the following descriptions, I rate this book as a must-read:
- Anyone leading or contemplating a PowerPivot deployment (the total system, as opposed to just viewing it as Excel 2010++)
- Excel pros who have read Bill's book and want to expand their expertise - I suspect a lot of you will decide, correctly, that a full PowerPivot system makes your talents a lot more valuable and visible, and will find yourselves on point for test deployments
-BI or SharePoint pros who are ramping up on PowerPivot (or evaluating PowerPivot's impact on their work)
Rob Collie
PowerPivotPro
It is split up in three main parts, first an introduction to PowerPivot, why do we need PowerPivot and a first look at PowerPivot. Great introductory work from the writers. The second part is "Creating Self-Service BI Applications Using PowerPivot". Here we learn how to work with PowerPivot itself from loading the data to publishing it to SharePoint.
The last part is truly meant for the It Pro with a setup, troubleshoot, architecture deep dive and Enterprise considerations. Great information anyone should know when they want to go and install PowerPivot for your company (or as a consultant).
I recommend this book for anyone who wants to start using or consulting PowerPivot at a professional level, it is really full with information and background. I read it in two days while I was on holiday great stuff !
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