Power Pivot and Power BI: The Excel User's Guide to Dax, Power Query, Power Bi & Power Pivot in Excel 2010-2016 - Softcover

Collie, Rob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1615470395 ISBN 13: 9781615470396

Publisher: Holy Macro! Books (US), 2016

Synopsis

Microsoft PowerPivot is a free add-on to Excel from Microsoft that allows users to produce new kinds of reports and analyses that were simply impossible before, and this book is the first to tackle DAX formulas, the core capability of PowerPivot, from the perspective of the Excel audience. Written by the world’s foremost PowerPivot blogger and practitioner, the book’s concepts and approach are introduced in a step-by-step manner tailored to the learning style of Excel users everywhere. The techniques presented allow users to produce, in hours or even minutes, results that formerly would have taken entire teams weeks or months to produce. The “pattern-like” techniques and best practices contained in this book have been developed and refined over two years of onsite training with Excel users around the world, and the key lessons from those seminars costing thousands of dollars per day are now available within the pages of this easy-to-follow guide. This updated edition covers new features introduced with Office 2015.

About this title

About the Author

Rob Collie, one of the founding engineers behind Power Pivot during his 14-year career at Microsoft and creator of the world's first Power Pivot service, is one of the foremost authorities on self-service business intelligence and next-generation spreadsheet technology. In 2010, he realised that Power Pivot was not "just another tech" and that its power resided not in the software itself, but in the unique way it empowers human beings. Inspired, he left Microsoft and founded a consulting and training company, P3Adaptive.com to make that human empowerment his full-time mission. Avichal Singh built a successful Power Pivot BI platform during his tenure at Microsoft. Avichal has a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Washington and spend 10+ years as a business analyst at Microsoft.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Power Pivot and Power BI: the Excel User's Guide to the Data Revolution

By Rob Collie, Avi Singh

Holy Macro! Books

Copyright © 2016 Robert Collie and Tickling Keys, Inc.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61547-039-6

Contents

Dedications, 
Supporting Workbooks and Data Sets, 
Errata and Book Support, 
A Note on Hyperlinks, 
Foreword and Forward, 
Introduction - Our Two Goals for this Book, 
1 - A Revolution Built On YOU, 
2 - Power Pivot and the Power BI Family: Making Sense of the Various Versions, 
3 - Learning Power Pivot "The Excel Way", 
4 - Loading Data Into Power Pivot, 
5 - Intro to Calculated Columns, 
6 - Introduction to DAX Measures, 
7 - The "Golden Rules" of DAX Measures, 
8 - CALCULATE() – Your New Favorite Function, 
9 - ALL() – The "Remove a Filter" Function, 
10 - Thinking in Multiple Tables, 
11 - "Intermission" – Taking Stock of Your New Powers, 
12 - Disconnected Tables, 
13 - Introducing the FILTER() Function, and Disconnected Tables Continued, 
14 - Introduction to Time Intelligence, 
15 - IF(), SWITCH(), BLANK(), and Other Conditional Fun, 
16 - SUMX() and Other X ("Iterator") Functions, 
17 - Multiple Data Tables, 
18 - Multiple Data Tables – Differing Granularity, 
19 - Performance: Keep Things Running Fast, 
20 - Power Query to the Rescue, 
21 - Power BI Desktop, 
22 - "Complicated" Relationships, 
23 - Row and Filter Context Demystified, 
24 - CALCULATE and FILTER – More Nuances, 
25 - Time Intelligence with Custom Calendars: Greatest Formula in the World, 
26 - Advanced Calculated Columns, 
27 - New DAX Functions ... and Variables!, 
28 - "YouTube for Data" – The Importance of a Server, 
PS: Can We Ask You for a Special Favor?, 
A1 - Power Pivot and SSAS Tabular: Two Tools for the Price of One (again!), 
A2 - Cube Formulas – the End of GetPivotData(), 
A3 - Some Common Error Messages, 
A4 - People: The Most Powerful Feature of Power Pivot, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

A Revolution Built On YOU

Does This Sound Familiar?

(Updated Fall 2015, but we decided to leave this part in Rob's first-person "voice" – because the authenticity is better-preserved).

In the movie Fight Club, Edward Norton's character refers to the people he meets on airplanes as "single serving friends" – people he befriends for three hours and never sees again. I have a unique perspective on this phenomenon, thanks to a real-world example that is relevant to this book.

A woman takes her seat for a cross-country business flight and is pleased to see that her seatmate appears to be a reasonably normal fellow. They strike up a friendly conversation, and when he asks her what she does for a living, she gives the usual reply: "I'm a marketing analyst."

That answer satisfies 99% of her single-serving friends, at which the conversation typically turns to something else. However, this guy is the exception, and asks the dreaded follow-up question: "Oh, neat! What does that mean?"

She sighs, ever so slightly, because the honest answer to that question always bores people to death. Worse than that actually: it often makes the single-serving friend recoil a bit, and express a sentiment bordering on pity.

But she's a factual sort of person, so she gives a factual answer: "well, basically I work with Excel all day, making PivotTables." She fully expects this to be a setback in the conversation, a point on which we share no common ground.<

Edition details

• Publisher: Holy Macro! Books (US)
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1615470395
• ISBN 13: 9781615470396
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 314