1. Realizing Business Insights with PowerPivot
4/20/2017 1:05 PM
Realizing Business Insights with PowerPivot
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2. About the Presenter Chris Campbell ccampbell@blue-granite.com
Principal Consultant with BlueGranite
Certified Professional in Microsoft BI Development
Microsoft Virtual Technology Specialist
Business Intelligence Technical Architect at the Microsoft Technology Center, Detroit

3. Agenda Introduction What is PowerPivot? Data Modeling for Analysis
Demo
Resources
Questions

4. About BlueGranite Established 1996 in Kalamazoo, Michigan
Member Microsoft BI Partner Advisory Council

5. What is PowerPivot?

6. Trends in Business Intelligence
BI 2.0
Discoverability
Collaboration
Self Service
Business Insights
Data Access
Structured & Unstructured Data
Business Owned, IT Managed
Agile
Flexible
Collaborative
BI 1.0
Silo
Silo
Unstructured Data
Structured Data
IT Owned & Managed
Slow to Respond
Monolithic
Not Interactive

7. A solution that re-defines the line between I.T. and end-user roles
What is PowerPivot?
A solution that re-defines the line between I.T. and end-user roles
Users
Model
Analyze
Personalize
Share BI solutions
I.T.
Provision
Administer
Secure
Track data
... using familiar tools without requesting support
… managing usage and
resources involved

8. Why Use PowerPivot? Process massive amounts of data in seconds
Take advantage of familiar Excel tools and features
Load even the largest data sets from virtually any source
It is FREE!
It’s sort of free…anyone with Excel 2010 can download and install the Excel add-in. To take advantage of the SharePoint publishing capabilities, you must install PowerPivot for SharePoint on a SharePoint server. The PowerPivot for SharePoint license is included with SQL Server 2008 R2 but you must consider server licensing for both SharePoint and SQL Server of whatever server you install it on.

9. Build Rich Interactive Dashboard Applications in Excel
PowerPivot for Excel 2010
Build Rich Interactive Dashboard Applications in Excel
With a few mouse clicks, a user can create and publish intuitive and interactive self-service analysis solutions.

10. Import and Extend Data Models
Visual Data Modeling
Import and Extend Data Models
Create relationships between “corporate” data and external data

11. Import Massive Data Volumes
PowerPivot for Excel:
Process massive amounts of data directly in Microsoft Office Excel
Broad Support for Data Sources
xVelocity Columnar Compression

12. Interactive Slicers in Excel and in SharePoint
Excel 2010 and Excel Services
Interactive slicers enable users to look at the data from various directions in Excel 2010 and in the browser through PowerPivot for SharePoint and Excel Services.

13. Understand What Data is Important
Increase IT efficiency:
Familiar Technologies for Authoring, Sharing, Security, and Compliance
Customizable IT Dashboard
Visualize usage with animated charts
IT knows author, data sources, and users, great, but what about the refresh settings? These settings seemed to bother some IT pros. Can you prevent users/owners of BI solutions from changing these settings?
Operations Dashboard, how does it help IT folks to stay on top of the self-service BI game?
Bring details along the lines of customizations. Audience might want to change the default reports provided.
Server Status
CPU and Memory Utilization
System Capacity and Performance
Workbook and User Activity over Time
Quality of Service
Query Response Times
Current Server State
Largest and Most Popular Solutions
Solution Statistics and Monitoring
Document Information and Data Sources
Activity and Top Users
Query Performance per Workbook
Simplify management of SSBI content using IT Operations Dashboard for SharePoint

14. Download and Install PowerPivot
Go to and choose a version

15. Download and Install PowerPivot
Make sure to select the appropriate version for your version of office (32-bit or 64-bit)

16. Finding out what version of Excel You Have
In Excel, Click “File” then Help. The version of Excel is noted under “About Microsoft Excel”

17. Installing PowerPivot
PowerPivot installs as an “add-in” to Excel. It appears as a new tab on the Ribbon.

18. Data Modeling for Analysis

19. Online Transaction Processing
OLTP vs. OLAP
Online Transaction Processing
Designed for transaction based systems (Sales, Inventory, Manufacturing, etc.)
Most LOB, ERP and CRM systems fall into this category
Inserting and retrieving data for single or small subsets of records is very fast
Summary reporting against large data sets is slower
Complex data structures are difficult to understand and use by end-users
OLTP Databases are “traditional”, transactional databases that are generally tied to Line of Business systems like Point of Sale, Inventory, Manufacturing, Financial, etc.
There were designed with the application in mind and are very good at getting data in one record at a time.
They contain all of the information we need but they are not very good at summarizing data or generating reports for large volumes of data.
The structures are hard to understand by end-users.

20. Online Analytic Processing
OLTP vs. OLAP
Online Analytic Processing
Designed specifically for reporting systems
Built to consolidate and summarize data from OLTP systems
Usually built to bulk load data in an off-line mode from back-end systems
Summary reporting against large data sets is very fast
Data Structures are built with the end-user in mind to allow for easy data analysis with familiar tools
OLAP databases on the other hand, are designed specifically with the end-user in mind. They are meant to be bulk loaded and are tuned for fast summary reporting. Data structures are simplified with clarity being the primary goal.

21. OLAP Data Modeling
OLAP Data Models generally take the form of a “Star” Schema
Two kinds of tables
Dimension
Fact
Fact tables have a 1:M relationship to all Dimension tables.
In both types of databases, data is related between the tables in one of three ways:
1:1 means that for every record on the main table there will be only one record on the secondary table.
Example: A Customer has only one home address.
1:M means that for every record on the main table, there may be more than one record on the secondary table.
Example: A Customer has made many purchases.
M:M means that for every record on each table, there may be more than one record on the secondary table.
Example: A Customer has many Accounts and each Account may have many Customers related to it.
M:M relationships are complex to model and are out of scope for this session.
In an OLAP database, there are two types of tables:
Fact tables contain the lowest level transactions for our purposes. For instance, purchase transactions might be considered facts.
Dimension tables contain the attributes that we might want to report on. For example: Customer, Product, Store, Date, etc.
Fact tables are always related to one or more Dimension tables using 1:M relationships. Each table is related to another using “Key” values.

22. OLAP Data Modeling We think of an OLAP data model as a “Cube”
An OLAP cube allows you to “slice and dice” data in many ways. It is a data structure built on top of the OLAP database and allows us to easily manipulate the data.
The cube concept gives us an easy way to visualize how the data is stored and accessed. In reality, we are not constrained to 3 dimensions but it’s not easy to visually represent more than that.
There are two basic types of data in an OLAP solution:
Measures are the numbers that we report “on”…Sales, quantity, cost, headcount, etc. Measures are quantitative in nature and can usually be summed (or aggregated in some other fashion…Avg, Min, Max, etc.)
Dimensions are what we report “by”…for example, by Date, by Region or by Product.
Combining the Measures with the Dimensions allows us to build up the reports that answer our day-to- day business questions.
We think of an OLAP data model as a “Cube”
Dimensions are what we report “by”
Measures are what we report “on”

23. Data Modeling for Analysis
PowerPivot blurs the line between dimensions and facts.
Only requires that a user understand where the numbers are and how they want to slice them.
Can join together many disparate data sources.
DAX allows you to manipulate the data and build custom calculations.
PowerPivot helps you build an OLAP model from your data sources so that you can perform the same types of “slice and dice” reporting that is available from cubes built in traditional Business Intelligence implementations. To build this model, you must understand the basic fundamentals of relating data.

24. DEMO
Building a Data Model and Dashboard with PowerPivot

25. DAX Evaluation Context
Row Context
“The current row”
Determined by the content of the TABLE
Includes ALL columns
May include “RELATED()” columns from other tables
Query Context
What row(s) and column(s) are selected?
Determined by what are on rows/columns in your pivot table
Filter Context
What rows are left after the filter is applied?
Row Context
Query Context
Filter Context
Result

26. DAX Evaluation Context – Example
Row Context
Product
Category
Quantity
Unit Price
Amount
15” Tablet
Computers 5
$500
$2500
17” Laptop 1
$1200
Halo 4
Games
$60
Query Context
Category
Amount
Computers
$3700
Games
$60
In the example above, Amount is a calculated column…the product of Quantity and Unit Price. In the first table, it is said to have Row context because it is calculated for each row of the table.
In the second example, the table has be summarized by Category and restricted to just Category and Amount as would have been done in a pivot table. This is the result of Query Context. By having the pivot table summarize our data, we have altered the result and caused a calculation to occur.
In the final example, we have filtered to only Computers thus applying Filter context to obtain the final result.
Filter Context
Category
Amount
Computers
$3700

27. PowerPivot Management Dashboard
DEMO
PowerPivot Management Dashboard

28. PowerPivot Management Dashboard

29. Management Dashboard – Server Activity

30. Management Dashboard – Workbook Activity

31. Management Dashboard – Workbook Details

32. Resources

33. Resources: Microsoft BI/SharePoint
Microsoft Business Intelligence
SharePoint BI website
Business Intelligence TechCenter
SQL Server 2008 R2

34. PowerPivot Resources Web sites BOL http://msbiacademy.com
BOL

35. Blogs SharePoint Insights blog Excel blog PowerPivot blog
Excel blog
PowerPivot blog
PerformancePoint Services blog
Reporting Services blog

36. Questions? ccampbell@blue-granite.com b-chcamp@microsoft.com