The star of The Office Show's finance and budgeting episode is PowerPivot, an amazing add-in for Excel. Guest bloggers and PowerPivot experts Emilie Bridon and Oliver Chiu explain how it works:
Working with data in Excel 2010 can be a beautiful thing,
Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, but getting your data into Excel can be a huge chore, especially if it's in different places. PowerPivot, a free add-in from Microsoft,
Office 2010 Download, makes it easy to pull in data from multiple sources and merge it all into one workbook. It's like supercharging your spreadsheets with live data.
In this excerpt from The Office Show, Oliver demonstrates some of PowerPivot's incredible features:
Integrate data from a multitude of sources, including corporate databases, spreadsheets, reports, text files, and Internet data feeds. Interactively explore, analyze, and create reports without depending on expert knowledge and specialty training. Use native Excel 2010 functionality such as PivotTables, slicers, and other familiar analysis features. Process large data sets. You can easily consume hundreds of millions of rows of data.
Connecting to data
Connecting to live data is simple. Utilize the Table Import Wizard in PowerPivot to select the data source that you want. You can connect to virtually any type of data,
Office Enterprise 2007, including corporate databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, Sybase,
Windows 7 Serial, or personal sources like Access, Excel,
Office Professional 2007, and live data feeds. You can even connect PowerPivot to Facebook Insights OData feed.
Creating an interactive dashboard
Once you've brought in the right data, you can create dashboards that update dynamically. Just select the PivotTable drop-down and select the style of output that you want. PowerPivot makes it easy to create a compelling and interactive view of the data, with standard Excel features like PivotCharts and slicers.
Experience PowerPivot yourself
Download PowerPivot for Excel 2010 for free today www.powerpivot.com.
-- Emilie Bridon and Oliver Chiu
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