Excel career: macros or power-pivot?

[Gry]

Hello,

I am new to this forum, and need some help to decide which way I should expand my excel-skills. I use excel for a lot of reporting. Should I take a course in macros or power pivot? BR Gry

[Fotis1991]

Power Pivots are a very strong Excel tool for reports.

VBA does great job!

Personally i like to use formulas for my reports!

So correct answer in your question is: Depands on everyone. I don't believe that there is a rule for this!

[Debraj Roy]

and if we any rule.. then the rule is..
Follow any excel forum regularly.. I bet no one/book/course can teach you better than this..

[Andy Pope]

If you are already doing reporting without VBA I would research PowerPivot, in fact look in to all the new BI features being made available in xl2013.

Suprised though you have not already found the need for VBA, if only to make it easier/quicker to manipulate data and build report framework.

[AB33]

In an ideal world, you would use the power of Pivot and BI using a VBA code. This would kill two birds with a stone.

[Kyle123]

If you import data from a database for reporting, I would have though that SQL would be infinitely more useful than either VBA or Power Pivot. I've never really got power pivot, it's just like a really slow and irritating pivot table - but then I'm happy summarising data in SQL

[AB33]

Kyle123,
SQL requires learning a new language( If SQL is a language), but you can get away with Power Pivot with in a day.

[Kyle123]

I reckon you could get away with SQL in a day, at least for the basics - it's pretty simple and it's hardly a language (unlike VBA).

SQL is a doddle, it's only difficult because it requires a different way of thinking - it's more head scratching than learning

Though it would require some understanding of relational databases, but then so would Power Pivot

[AB33]

Kyle 123,

I bought a book called learning VBA in 21 days. I do not know what the author has in mind when he wrote the book. I have passed my 210 days and still have not finish it yet. I would take your positive encouragement to learn with in a day and might take the dive-in, but I may struggle to float-out for breathing.

[Kyle123]

lol sql is far more simple than VBA, it's a straightforward way of updating and reading from tables in a textual manner. You should get the basics here: http://www.w3schools.com/sql/, don't get bogged down in any of the creating tables, adding indexes etc in sql - this isn't done very often and is often done in the GUI. All beginners really need to know is how to extract data, so anything that starts with a SELECT key word.

I talked one of the finance guys through it at work and within an hour he could write basic queries and start pulling data if that's any encouragement!!