How to use Power Pivot in Excel with large data sets
Excel is widely used in business since it is a very powerful tool for getting meaning out of vast amounts of data, quickly and easily. But it also works really well for simple calculations and tracking.
It contains many functions that allow you to perform tasks without extra work, including Power Pivot, which you turn on in Excel as an Add-In or. as an Appendix.
When users want to work with Power Pivot functions, the following problems may occur:
- Firstly, the duplicates of data required by the data model are not the clearest, what kind of duplicate data it is and what should be corrected (rows, columns, values, names?),
- If you manage to break through the duplicates, you will soon find out that making a data model is not just a “piece of cake”,
- you may even create a report and then find that you would like to monitor additional data that you insert into the source files, the Power Pivot sometimes reads this data, but sometimes your excel simply “freezes”.
- Or one morning, when you're in a hurry to submit a report, you simply can't open the Excel file at all because the amount of data in the tables has become too large.
In practice, it has been shown that there is simply too much data to use Power Pivot as an Add-In. It may still be working on some small data sets, but these four columns that Power Pivot can read are too few for the data analysis and reports a company would want to have.
Fortunately, the solution to using Power Pivot is fairly simple; namely, we use it “in parts” or in individual elements. Power Pivot is just a term for a set of elements that have always existed in Excel and can be used individually and only those that we really need, but even more important, they really work in practice and are not limited by the amount of data.
The individual elements of a Power Pivot are:
- Power Query, which can be used in different ways,
- Power Pivot & Chart Wizard, a wizard for creating interactive reports and more,
- Conditional formatting of results,
- The data model is created by a combination of Power Queries from different sources and is combined into a single common query, from which we create KPIs and reports.
When using individual Power Pivot functionalities, we avoid problems with data duplication, and adding and amount of data is no longer a problem.
Excel and Practice courses › teach you exactly that; how to create stable and efficient automated solutions with the help of individual Power Pivot functionalities, from data entry to interactive reports, i.e. from the very beginning to the final solution