Chapter 35: Introducing Power Pivot
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As a general rule, Power Pivot workbooks created in a version of Excel that is equal to or less than
your version should give you no problems. However, you will not be able use Power Pivot workbooks
created in a version of Excel greater than your version.
Linking Excel tables to Power Pivot
The first step in using Power Pivot is to fill it with data. You can either import data from
external data sources or link to Excel tables in your current workbook. For now, let’s start
this walk-through by linking three Excel tables to Power Pivot.Most of the examples in this chapter are available on this book’s website at http://www.wiley.com/go/
excel2019bible. The filename is Power Pivot Intro.xlsx.
In this scenario, we have three data sets in three different worksheets (see Figure 35.2):
Customers, Invoice Header, and Invoice Details.FIGURE 35.2
We want to use Power Pivot to analyze the data in the Customers, Invoice Header, and
Invoice Details worksheets.The Customers data set contains basic information like Customer ID, Customer Name, Address,
and so forth. The Invoice Header data set contains data that points specific invoices to spe-
cific customers. The Invoice Details data set contains the specifics of each invoice.We want to analyze revenue by customer and month. It’s clear that we’ll somehow need to
join these three tables together before we can do our analysis. In the past, we would have
to go through a series of gyrations involving VLOOKUPs or other clever formulas. But with
Power Pivot, we can build these relationships in just a few clicks.