Open invitation from Microsoft: Fire away with your PowerPivot questions

Hi, Emilie from PowerPivot here.

I’m posting to invite everyone on Excel Forum to ask us anything… anything about PowerPivot that is. Myself or another Microsoft rep will be monitoring this thread to answer questions and respond to feedback during business hours until 5/17.

If you’re unfamiliar with PowerPivot, here are a few features showing how it can enhance your Excel experience and improve BI:

• Manipulate gazillions of rows at lightning fast speed directly in Excel.
• Detect relationships automatically between tables. No more V-Lookups!
• Retrieve date from virtually any source.

To find out more about PowerPivot’s Excel-boosting abilities, check out some demo videos on the PowerPivot website, or skip ahead and download the add-in for free.

In related news, we’re running a contest on Facebook. To join in the fun, all you have to do is head over to the PowerPivot Facebook page, ‘like’ the page, and take our Nerdtastic Quiz. Besides learning if you’re the nerdiest PowerPivot user of them all, you’ll automatically be entered to win an Xbox 360 with Kinect just for participating.

Well I think that’s everything. Fire away!

- Emilie

Emilie Bridon
PowerPivot Product Manager

Hi, I am looking for some guidance on whether or not PowerPivot is a good tool to solve my current application problem.

Background: I currently use a typical Excel workbook to pull data from a table with about 100,000 rows of data. Specifically I have a data table with about 100,000 rows of data in worksheet one. In worksheet two, I have about 1,000 rows of different data which I use to create a unique text string. I then use this unique text string in VLOOKUP formulas to get specific data from worksheet one. The unique text string coinsides with only one row of data from worksheet one. This seems to work fine for me.

However, now I need to do the same analysis with about 1.4 million rows of data in the data table. I can't quite fit it all into one worksheet.

Is PowerPivot a good tool in this case to allow me to work with over a million rows of data? Would I still be doing it the same way with a VLOOKUP formula?

Please give me your thoughts on the best structure to solve this new need.

Thanks,
One Trader

Hi One Trader!

Sorry for the delay in responding, but I would check out this case study where the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) used Microsoft products to create a mission-critical solution to provide powerful business intelligence capabilities: http://cot.ag/mvy8IK.

Also PowerPivot is know for helping you manipulate millions upon millions of rows of data. We've got a few examples in our hands on lab that you can try here.

Hope this helps answer your questions, but if not, let me know and I'll keep digging for more information.

Emilie

Emilie,
I recently installed powerpivot and have run into some problems when trying to link tables.
I have 2 worksheets in a excel file and would like to load both into a power pivot table. When I click the 'create linked table' in the power pivot ribbon, The powerpivot window open and looks like its about to load the data but then I get a popup dialogue error boxes with the following error:

Unable to load the tables in the powerpivot window . I attached 2 images of the errors I am recieving.

When I try again, there is a meesage saying the table is already linked but I dont see any data.

Do you have any idea why this is happening?

Thanks in advance,

Nathan