PowerPivot Components

PowerPivot enables Excel users to build workbooks that embed Analysis Services databases and make them available to other users via SharePoint Server. Shown here are the major components of a PowerPivot solution.

The free PowerPivot for Excel add-in (top) enables an expert Excel 2010 user (the author) to create an Excel file (workbook) that contains a multidimensional database or “cube,” similar to the databases managed by the SQL Server Analysis Services product. The data can come from a variety of data sources, including SQL Server, Excel, other vendors’ database products, and text files. The author designs and loads the database, and then creates PivotTables, PivotCharts, and other Excel features for analysis. The data are stored in the workbook and analyzed in memory like other Excel data, using a compression technology that enables PowerPivot to handle data sets of millions of rows. (The actual amount of data handled depends on the characteristics of the data sources and is limited to 4GB in memory and 2GB total workbook file size.)