PowerPivot Strengthens Analytics in Excel, SharePoint 2010

The PowerPivot add-ins for Excel 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, planned for release with SQL Server 2008 R2 in May 2010, enable expert users to create and share Excel workbooks for analyzing large data sets to look for patterns, track business metrics, or do other business intelligence (BI) tasks. By leveraging Excel and SharePoint, PowerPivot could open data analysis to users who can’t use the powerful but complex tools that ship with SQL Server. However, PowerPivot requires new versions of Excel, SharePoint Server, and SQL Server, and will require expert users and IT support to be effective.

Analysis Services Inside Excel and SharePoint Server

PowerPivot is a database engine that enables users to create and process large multidimensional databases (sometimes called cubes) embedded in Excel files (workbooks). Multidimensional databases provide efficient analysis of large data sets at multiple levels of detail, either interactively (a process called on-line analytic processing, or OLAP) or through automated analysis (data mining). For example, an analysis might use a multidimensional database to break down several years of customer transactions by region and customer to identify cross-selling patterns, or examine service records by product category, customer, and time period to optimize product maintenance schedules.