PowerPivot: What a name! Or I should really say what’s in a name? Powerful Pivoting? Pivot-table for power users?

PowerPivot is a lot more than that. When I started the PowerPivot project back in 2007, along with Amir Netz (Microsoft BI Distinguished Engineer), the incubation project was called BI Sandbox. We had been looking at a problem that had often been raised to us by IT people over years of trying to implement a BI system with both Microsoft and non-Microsoft software. How could they set up an environment to enable their business users to build their own BI applications without needing assistance from IT? They wanted to focus on building the right data store for the enterprise, secure it, and ensure its quality, but also get out of the business of building one-off applications or reports for business users. And thus the BI Sandbox project was born. We would build an environment for users to play (sandbox) and do what they needed to do without needing to rely on IT folks to build it for them. Now IT would provide and provision the infrastructure and data source access, but they wouldn’t need to get involved in the building work for the application itself. This did make a lot of sense as business users understand their needs better than anyone else and often don’t have the patience or simply the luxury of time to wait for IT to queue this project behind all the other ones and build it three to six months later. So we had our vision and a real problem to solve. The next question was: how

250 + ready-to-use, powerful DAX formulas

Develop effective business intelligence (BI) solutions and drive faster, better decision making across your enterprise with help from an experienced database consultant and trainer. Through clear explanations, screenshots, and examples, Practical PowerPivot & DAX Formulas for Excel 2010 shows you how to extract actionable insights from vast amounts of corporate data. More than 250 downloadable DAX formulas plus valuable appendixes covering SQL, MDX, and DMX query design are included in this hands-on guide.

• Build pivot tables and charts with PowerPivot for Excel
• Import information from Access, Excel, data feeds, SQL Server, and other sources
• Organize and format BI reports using the PowerPivot Field List
• Write DAX formulas that filter, sort, average, and denormalize data
• Construct complex DAX formulas from statistical, math, and date functions
• Compare current and past performance using date and time intelligence
• Handle non-additive numbers, non-numeric values, and running totals
• Develop complete self-service and sharable BI solutions in a few minutes

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