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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good intro to PowerPivot, July 28, 2010
The good:
* Excellent information on new features and capabilities of PowerPivot tables. Lots of good examples.
* Good compare & contrast with base PivotTables.
* Good documentation of some of the v1 PowerPivot limitations.
* The prose is very easy to read.
The gaps:
* The book was written before the final product was delivered. It would be good to see some errata/revisions covering changes made in the mean time for early buyers.
* Probably somewhat related to the above, the discussion of DAX is fairly limited. DAX is the real key feature that makes PowerPivot more powerful than base PivotTables. (The best reference source I've seen so far is the MS "Data Analysis Expressions in PowerPivot for Excel 2010" document.)
* It would have been nice to explain some considerations when moving models from PivotTables to PowerPivot. For example, PivotTables by definition have to have everything in one giant table. PowerPivot models end up working better with separated lookup (dimension) tables in my experience so far.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best starting point for an Excel Pro, August 23, 2010
Excerpt from my full review at PowerPivotPro:
My biggest overall conclusion after reading Bill's book is that Excel users will be hard-pressed to find a better place to start their PowerPivot journey. Bill is not a SQL guy and he is not an MS employee - he has been building spreadsheets in the wild since before Pivots even existed. And for many years now he has made his living simply teaching others to get the most out of Excel.
That history and perspective shows through in the book. Reading it is VERY different from reading any of the MS documentation on PowerPivot for instance - that MS content is excellent at describing PowerPivot, but it just isn't written by a multi-decade Excel maestro, so it doesn't tell Excel users, in detail, what will be familiar to them and what will be new.
What the book is NOT
Clocking in at 294 pages, this book doesn't try to do everything, which I think is wise. I don't think any Excel pro wants to pick up, as a starting point, a 1200 page bible. This book is an excellent intro and you will hit the ground running fast, but at some point later, you will eventually go looking for:
- An in-depth guide to high-powered DAX measures
- An in-depth guide to the implications of various table structures and relationships
- Performance-tuning reference
- A how-to reference for deploying PowerPivot for SharePoint
- List of best practices, tips and tricks, workarounds for Excel Services on SharePoint
Like I said, as an Excel pro, you are MUCH better off NOT trying to tackle those up front. You can get incredible mileage out of PowerPivot without once touching those topics. You will want to someday, but you don't NEED to, so I highly recommend Excel pros pick up this book as their starting point.
-Rob Collie
PowerPivotPro
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent introduction to PowerPivot, October 29, 2010
This book examines in detail PowerPivot which is a free add-in for Excel 2010. It makes possible the analysis of very large amounts of data normally beyond the capability of Excel. PowerPivot is not for the faint hearted and is aimed at experienced users of Excel who are familiar and comfortable with lookup functions, pivot tables and databases.
To take full advantage of the book, you will need to download PowerPivot from [...] and also the author's example files from [...] There are 32-bit and 64-bit versions of PowerPivot and it is essential that you choose the one which matches your 32-bit or 64-bit version of Excel 2010.
The introductory chapter is a personal and interesting account which puts PowerPivot into context and shows the enthusiasm that Mr Excel has for his subject. After discussing how to obtain and install PowerPivot the book then begins to go into detail about how and when to use this application. Whilst it is clear that the author is a passionate advocate of PowerPivot, he is also critical of what he sees as shortcomings - for example, not easily being able to sort in month order - and he devotes a whole chapter to explaining the circumstances in which you might decide that a conventional pivot table might be a better approach.
The book gives detailed descriptions of the steps involved in many different tasks clearly illustrated with accompanying diagrams and supported by the exercise files that you can work through yourself. These include:
* Importing data
* Sorting
* Defining relationships between multiple tables
* Creating pivot tables using multiple sources
* Using the new DAX data analysis functions
* Using Slicers
* Creating charts
There are plenty of tips with two whole chapters on "cool tricks" separately devoted to working with conventional pivot tables and those created using PowerPivot. Advice on solving problems caused by "bad data" is included.
There are a few typographical errors in the text but the tasks are very well explained and so it is not difficult to work through the examples using the files provided to arrive at the required result.
In addition to the book and downloadable resources, there are 13 very watchable and informative You Tube videos in which the author demonstrates a topic from each chapter. These last only a few minutes each but give a good overview and may well be worth watching first before you attempt the exercises.
Overall, this is an excellent introduction to PowerPivot which takes you all the way from importing data to creating dashboards for the boardroom. If you are looking for a stimulating book to guide you towards a good knowledge of PowerPivot, choose this one.
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