C H A P T E R  1

Getting Started with PowerPivot for Excel

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

—Lao-tzu

When I began working in business intelligence almost 18 years ago, the overarching goal was to create a subject-oriented data store that could be used by an ordinary business worker without SQL skills to answer questions and confirm hypothesis. Great work was done by my teammates and I to move data from data storage structures designed for transaction capture into dimensional models designed from the start for processing analytical queries. The analytical data store, in the form of a data mart, data warehouse, or otherwise will maintain a vital purpose in business decision-making.

However, there is more to supplying data to the business decision-making process than simply creating a central data store for analysis. Because of the time lag required to design, construct, and test, the data in one of these formal structures, sanctioned by an information technology department, will always lag behind the needs of users. Your organization’s information workers, people for whom a part of their job is making decisions based on data they gather and format, are already finding ways to work around this lag and get their jobs done, via massive Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or Microsoft Access databases. Fortunate organizations have someone filling this gap, combining the data from the sanctioned, corporate database with other data to make informed decisions.

Because of the explosion of data available (cash register scans, weather trends, etc.), the job of information workers is becoming increasingly difficult. The information worker may be the CEO of a small business trying to forecast demand for their products to justify expansion or an accounting clerk trying to slice the monthly TPS report in a new way to understand software delivery issues.