Alexander - Excel Power Pivot et Power Query for dummies

Excel Power Pivot & Power Query For Dummies

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Copyright 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933854

ISBN 978-1-119-21064-1 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-21066-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-21065-8 (ebk)

1. Table of Contents

Over the past few years, the concept of self-service business intelligence (BI) has taken over the corporate world. Self-service BI is a form of business intelligence in which end users can independently generate their own reports, run their own queries, and conduct their own analyses, without the need to engage the IT department.

The demand for self-service BI is a direct result of several factors:

• More power users: Organizations are realizing that no single enterprise reporting system or BI tool can accommodate all of their users. Predefined reports and high-level dashboards may be sufficient for casual users, but a large portion of todays users are savvy enough to be considered power users. Power users have a greater understanding of data analysis and prefer to perform their own analysis, often within Excel.
• Changing analytical needs: In the past, business intelligence primarily consisted of IT-managed dashboards showing historic data on an agreed-upon set of key performance metrics. Managers now demand more dynamic predictive analysis, the ability to perform data discovery iteratively, and the freedom to take the hard left and right turns on data presentation. These managers often turn to Excel to provide the needed analytics and visualization tools.
• Speed of BI: Users are increasingly dissatisfied with the inability of IT to quickly deliver new reporting and metrics. Most traditional BI implementations fail specifically because the need for changes and answers to new questions overwhelmingly outpaces the IT departments ability to deliver them. As a result, users often find ways to work around the perceived IT bottleneck and ultimately build their own shadow BI (under the radar) solutions in Excel.

Recognizing the importance of the self-service BI revolution and the role Excel plays in it, Microsoft has made substantial investments in making Excel the cornerstone of its self-service BI offering. These investments have appeared starting with Excel 2007. Here are a few of note: the ability to handle over a million rows, tighter integration to SQL Server, pivot table slicers, and not least of all, the introduction of the Power Pivot and Power Query add-ins.

With the release of Excel 2016, Microsoft has aggressively moved to make Excel a player in the self-service BI arena by embedding both Power Pivot and Power Query directly into Excel.

For the first time, Excel is an integral part of the Microsoft BI stack. You can integrate multiple data sources, define relationships between data sources, process analysis services cubes, and develop interactive dashboards that can be shared on the web. Indeed, the new Microsoft BI tools blur the line between Excel analysis and what is traditionally IT enterprise-level data management and reporting capabilities.

With these new tools in the Excel wheelhouse, its becoming important for business analysts to expand their skill sets to new territory, including database management, query design, data integration, multidimensional reporting, and a host of other skills. Excel analysts have to expand their skill set knowledge base from the one-dimensional spreadsheets to relational databases, data integration, and multidimensional reporting,

Thats where this book comes in. Here, youre introduced to the mysterious world of Power Pivot and Power Query. You find out how to leverage the rich set of tools and reporting capabilities to save time, automate data clean-up, and substantially enhance your data analysis and reporting capabilities.

The goal of this book is to give you a solid overview of the self-service BI functionality offered by Power Pivot and Power Query. Each chapter guides you through practical techniques that enable you to

• Extract data from databases and external files for use in Excel reporting