Part V: Understanding Power Pivot and Power Query
Preparing your Excel tables
When linking Excel data to Power Pivot, it’s a best practice first to convert your Excel data
to explicitly named tables. Although not technically necessary, giving your tables friendly
names helps track and manage your data in the Power Pivot data model. If you don’t con-
vert your data to tables first, Excel will do it for you and give your tables useless names like
Table1, Table2, and so on.
Follow these steps to convert each data set into an Excel table:
- Go to the Customers tab, and click anywhere inside the data range.
- Press Ctrl+T on your keyboard. This will activate the Create Table dialog box
shown in Figure 35.3.
FIGURE 35.3
Convert your data range into an Excel table.
- In the Create Table dialog box, make sure the range for the table is correct and
that the check box next to the “My table has headers” option is selected. Click
the OK button.
- You should now see a Table Tools Design tab on the Ribbon. Click that tab and
use the Table Name input to give your table a friendly name (see Figure 35.4). This
will ensure that you will be able to recognize the table when adding it to the inter-
nal data model.
FIGURE 35.4
Give your newly created Excel table a friendly name.
- Repeat steps 1–4 for the Invoice Header and Invoice Details data sets.
