The Excelerate course explains how Microsoft Excel, the free PowerPivot add-in and Microsoft SharePoint, the business collaboration tool, can be combined together to deliver the best of both worlds. This is complemented with a basic SQL and theoretical module that unravels Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence concepts.
The course outline is as follows:
- Unraveling BI.
- The basics of SQL.
- Excel 2010 for Reports and Dashboards.
- Excel 2010 Pivots and PowerPivots.
- Dashboarding and Reporting.
- SharePoint Collaboration.
Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is a new technology aimed at providing self-service Business Intelligence (BI).
PowerPivot is a real revolution inside the world of data analysis because it gives you all the power you need to perform complex analysis of data without requiring the intervention of BI technicians.
This tool, a free Excel add-in, implements a powerful in-memory database that can organize data, detect interesting relationships, and give you a swift way to browse information.
- The ability to organize tables for the PivotTable tool in a relational way, freeing the analyst from the need to import data as Excel worksheets before analyzing the data
- The availability of a fast, space-saving columnar database that can handle huge amounts of data without the limitations of Excel worksheets.
- DAX, a powerful programming language that defines complex expressions on top of the relational database. DAX allows you to define rich expressions, compared to those that are standard in Excel.
- Amazingly fast in-memory processing of complex queries over the whole database.
- SharePoint Integration. Enables users to share data models and analysis, and because the solutions are in SharePoint, you can configure refresh cycles to ensure the data remains current automatically.
- Virtually Unlimited Support of Data Sources.
Provides the foundation to load and combine source data from any location for massive data analysis on the desktop, including relational databases, multidimensional sources, cloud services, data feeds, Excel files, text files, and data from the Web. - PowerPivot Management Dashboard. Enables IT administrators to monitor and manage your shared applications to ensure security, high availability, and performance.
