Power Pivot

What are some of the best practices, hints, tips, tricks? hacks that you've learned to someone who's been working with data all their life? So the thing

that I observed that Power BI made possible for the first time ever back in, and really it started off with Power Pivot.

If you're really a deep cut, there was a product called Power Pivot before Power BI, and it's like the forerunner to Power BI.

But even in the Power Pivot days...

sounds like a splinter group that formed out of excel and went no we don't want to be here anymore we're really a database

it kind of was in a way but we but it happened from the outside in we we went and infected excel with power pivot it was power bi running in excel and only the only visual surface were excel charts excel pivot tables the excel grid um and for a number of reasons it turned out that's not what the market wanted The second coming, Power BI, was a world beater.

But it was the same underlying technology, the same...

And so with Power Pivot, I got to see that there could be a different way of working, a completely different workflow for approaching an analytics project or approaching a Power BI project.

from the Excel org.

Now, we did build this PowerPivot thing.

The first version of Power BI was built as an add-on into Excel because that's where the target audience lived.

But it was sort of like, we didn't really ask the Excel team's permission to do this.

And the concept that you can then enrich that data by adding a column that can look up from another table and bring back some extra data.

That's like the foundation of Power BI and Power Pivot data modeling and stuff.

So just getting your head around that concept, you're already a step up on most people who are just putting data in everywhere, which way.

Just a really good foundational skill.

As I finished writing the book, I was thrilled to be done with it, but bummed to no longer be writing.

From 2009 to 2015 or so, I wrote two blog posts a week on PowerPivot and Power BI and loved every minute of it.

Now, books are too much of a good thing.

Blogs are about right.