PowerPivot Components

PowerPivot enables Excel users, called model authors, to build workbooks that embed large data sets, called models, and make them available to other users using 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 model author to create an Excel file (workbook) that contains a data set (called a model) similar to the multidimensional databases, or “cubes,” used by the SQL Server Analysis Services feature in SQL Server. 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.)