# What is PowerPivot and Why Do I Care?



## MrExcel

PowerPivot is the best new feature to hit Excel in 20 years. It is a free add-in from Microsoft for people who are using Excel 2010.

It is a free tool for people using Excel 2010. If you are a fan of pivot tables, you will love PowerPivot. Using the free PowerPivot add-in, you can create pivot tables from data on sheet1 mashed up with sheet2, *without* doing any VLOOKUPs. You can import 100 Million rows from Oracle and mash it up with some web data and use the new DAX functions to do things that are impossible in regular pivot tables.

Here is a blog post from Rob Collie with the top five reasons to love PowerPivot:
http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft...1/top-5-ways-powerpivot-helps-excel-pros.aspx
(by the way, Rob wrote the definitive book on DAX formulas for PowerPivot: http://www.powerpivotpro.com/the-book/)

Or, my 4.7 minute video showing you why I think you should care:
http://youtu.be/ms149Qi2PVA

Or even better, check out this interactive web site I built using PowerPivot.  The applications on there were 100% built in Excel with PowerPivot – NO programming at all, just a “save as” of the workbooks to the server. NO installs are needed in order to view these live demos, just navigate to the site and enjoy:  http://mrexcel.hostedpowerpivot.com


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