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Data Modeling with Microsoft Excel
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To install or enable Power Pivot in Excel, please go through the following steps:
Figure 1.10 – Enabling the Data tab in Microsoft Excel
Figure 1.11 – Enabling the Power Pivot tab in Microsoft Excel
Figure 1.12 – Pop-up message while enabling Power Pivot
Figure 1.13 – Enabling the Power Pivot Tab in Microsoft Excel
Figure 1.14 – Process is complete
You should find the Tab present anytime you open a new workbook.
There are situations where the Power Pivot tab is not available when you open a new workbook. This could be because of low disk space or memory issues with the computer. A quick way to resolve this will be to restart your computer or create some disk space and follow the following steps:
This will display the following screen:
Figure 1.15 – Resetting the Power Pivot tab in Microsoft Excel
We have now installed Power Pivot. In the next section, we will take a tour to understand how we can take full advantage of some of the features of the tool for our data modeling.
In this section, we are going to explore some of the key features of Power Pivot. It’s important you begin learning about these features to help you use and apply them when we start working with data.
Figure 1.16 – Components of Excel’s Power Pivot
Some of the useful features of Power Pivot are described here:
Think of DAX as a more powerful version of the regular Excel formulas you might already know, such as SUM or AVERAGE. DAX allows you to do more complex things with your data, such as summing up sales for a specific time period or calculating year-over-year growth, all while working within your data model.
So, if you’re using a data model in Excel to help make sense of your business data, DAX is the tool that helps you ask specific questions and get precise answers from that model. It’s like having a super-smart calculator that can quickly crunch the numbers in different ways, helping you make better business decisions. We will go into this in detail in subsequent chapters. These calculations can result in a new dimensional column or a new measure.
Beyond understanding the features of Power Pivot, it is important to adopt some best practices when working with this tool. In the next section, we will cover some of these best practices.
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