Regular Excel Pivot Tables vs PowerPivot

Can anyone tell me the major advantages / disadvantages of using PowerPivot over a basic Excel Pivot Table?

I have read about it condensing file sizes (not critical to my application). Also, the measures seem to be easier in PowerPivot than the Calculated Fields in regular Pivot tables. Are there any other major pros / cons?

my project:

My end goal is to create a simple dashboard in Excel (for a non excel user) that visually shows a list of students and what % of their courses they have completed. The raw data (100-500 lines) is hard to read.

I created a pivot table and am using some slicers. That looks ok and works ok. I have to created a Calculated field for Percent of Courses Completed. If i do this in power pivot, I feel like i have more flexibility w/ Measures should I need to build on this going forward. Measures give you prompts for syntax and Calculated Fields don't.

When I have completed this, I will need to train an average Excel user how to copy, paste new data and refresh the dashboard. I have done this w/ regular pivot tables many times and it works well. Is it as simple to copy paste data into the data model as it is into a spreadsheet? I would have to confirm the user has power pivot right?

Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated.

Olly,

thanks for the confirmation. I suspected what you say is true, but I am still grinding through several tutorials to get the details. The more I am learning the more excited i am about the possibilities for these tools.

thanks for your detailed response.

Follow up question. Can you tell me when Power BI would be in play? most of my applications are on less than 20,000 rows of data. Is Power BI just excel pivot tables on steroids? Is this mostly relevant w/ larger data sets, or rather is more useful w/ more complicated data sets (multiple tables)?