What is Power Pivot?

To be responsive to an ever-changing business environment, decision-makers need easy access to information and the tools that allow them to derive new insights on demand. 'PowerPivot for Excel' enables the self-service BI solutions that have long been a challenge to deliver. PowerPivot refers to a collection of applications and services that provide an end-to-end solution for creating and sharing business intelligence using Excel and SharePoint.

How Pivot Pivot can integrate ...

PowerPivot integrates with Excel and SharePoint. In an Excel environment, 'PowerPivot for Excel' provides a familiar authoring and analytical experience on the workstation. In a SharePoint farm, 'PowerPivot for SharePoint' adds server-side applications and features that support PowerPivot data access and management for workbooks that you publish to SharePoint. PowerPivot server components load the data, process queries, perform scheduled data refresh, and track server and workbook usage in the farm.

Using the familiar Microsoft Excel interface, users can integrate information from enterprise data warehouses with manually constructed data or data from external sources at any time. External data sources can include data from a variety of sources, including Access, SQL Server, or SQL Azure databases, Analysis Services cubes, text files, data feeds, cloud services, Excel and PowerPivot workbooks, data from the Web, and other relational and multidimensional sources.

Users can then publish the results of their analysis to a SharePoint document library, thus centralizing their insights and enabling subsequent analysis using these workbooks as a source. By storing the PowerPivot workbooks in SharePoint, users can not only easily share the results of their analysis and collaborate with others, but they can also take advantage of other SharePoint features such as content management, search, social computing, and business intelligence dashboards. Using management tools for PowerPivot for SharePoint, IT can monitor workbook activity to keep track of popular data sources and to assess the impact of user queries on server resources.