What do you think?
Rate this book
DAX Formulas for PowerPivot: A Simple Guide to the Excel Revolution
Microsoft’s Power Pivot is an add-on to Excel that enables you to produce new kinds of reports and analyses that were simply impossible before. This book is the first to tackle DAX formulas, the core capability of Power Pivot, from the perspective of the Excel audience. Written by a leading Power Pivot educator (and former leader on the Power Pivot and Excel teams at Microsoft), the book’s concepts and approach are introduced in a simple, step-by-step manner tailored to the learning style of Excel users everywhere.
The techniques presented allow users to produce, in hours or even minutes, results that formerly would have taken entire teams weeks or months to produce. In this book you will learn how Power
1) Gives you “portable” formulas that can be re-used across multiple different reports with a single click.
2) Removes the need to ever write a VLOOKUP formula again.
3) Allows you to add smart calculations to pivots, such as “Year over Year” and “Moving Averages” which auto-adjust as the pivot changes.
4) Effortlessly merges disjointed sets of data into unified insight.
As a bonus, Power Pivot and DAX formulas are both the heart AND brain of Microsoft’s “Power BI” system, giving us a long-needed bridge between the worlds of Excel and Business Intelligence – a bridge that any Excel PivotTable user can cross with the help of this easy-to-follow book. Your new career – and your organization’s future – starts within these pages
The techniques presented allow users to produce, in hours or even minutes, results that formerly would have taken entire teams weeks or months to produce. In this book you will learn how Power
1) Gives you “portable” formulas that can be re-used across multiple different reports with a single click.
2) Removes the need to ever write a VLOOKUP formula again.
3) Allows you to add smart calculations to pivots, such as “Year over Year” and “Moving Averages” which auto-adjust as the pivot changes.
4) Effortlessly merges disjointed sets of data into unified insight.
As a bonus, Power Pivot and DAX formulas are both the heart AND brain of Microsoft’s “Power BI” system, giving us a long-needed bridge between the worlds of Excel and Business Intelligence – a bridge that any Excel PivotTable user can cross with the help of this easy-to-follow book. Your new career – and your organization’s future – starts within these pages
239 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2012
19 people are currently reading
168 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 1, 2012
I follow the blog of the author, Rob Collie. After seeing the video of the book getting printed I knew that I had to buy it. Oh, that and I'm a big PowerPivot fan and general Excel junkie. The book is a blast. Rob has a great writing style, honest and fun.
First, PowerPivot doesn't put Excel on steroids. Nor does it turbo charge it. Those metaphors fall short. It's more like PowerPivot takes a solid family sedan that you think you know and turns it into a NASCAR race car.
DAX Formulas for PowerPivot walks you through PowerPivot and how to get the most out of it's powerful DAX formulas. This not merely a reference book. It's full of how to's. Plus it's got nice big illustrations. I do have a couple of warnings for this book though:
1) I found myself up very late playing with PowerPivot stuff while reading this book. Don't start the book if something to do the next day, like go to work. Seriously, I'm not kidding.
2) Read the whole book. I had a personal project that coincided with some of the items in the book, so I started the project while reading the book. I ended up rebuilding the project twice as I worked through the examples. In my initial pass, my project was taking more than a minute to reload the data from the database. After following Rob's performance tips at the end, the reload was down to 13 seconds.
3) The short links to more information are case sensitive and contain both upper and lower case letters. Be careful when you type them.
Bottom line, if you use Excel for anything, and you can spell PowerPivot, you owe it to yourself to see what it can really do. This the book to teach you how.
First, PowerPivot doesn't put Excel on steroids. Nor does it turbo charge it. Those metaphors fall short. It's more like PowerPivot takes a solid family sedan that you think you know and turns it into a NASCAR race car.
DAX Formulas for PowerPivot walks you through PowerPivot and how to get the most out of it's powerful DAX formulas. This not merely a reference book. It's full of how to's. Plus it's got nice big illustrations. I do have a couple of warnings for this book though:
1) I found myself up very late playing with PowerPivot stuff while reading this book. Don't start the book if something to do the next day, like go to work. Seriously, I'm not kidding.
2) Read the whole book. I had a personal project that coincided with some of the items in the book, so I started the project while reading the book. I ended up rebuilding the project twice as I worked through the examples. In my initial pass, my project was taking more than a minute to reload the data from the database. After following Rob's performance tips at the end, the reload was down to 13 seconds.
3) The short links to more information are case sensitive and contain both upper and lower case letters. Be careful when you type them.
Bottom line, if you use Excel for anything, and you can spell PowerPivot, you owe it to yourself to see what it can really do. This the book to teach you how.
January 11, 2020
Too "sales" oriented. I was looking for some overall power bi knowledge, not sales only interest.
November 26, 2012
Wow, just wow. A must read for every Excel Pro looking to learn PowerPivot in a hurry.
January 30, 2020
This is an engaging book on a topic I find most interesting. I looked forward to finding opportunities to continue reading it and trying out some of the new techniques, even if I had to read some sections several times for them to sink in! I would definitely recommend.
January 17, 2016
PowerPivot really hits the sweet spot between the user-friendliness of normal Excel and the power/efficiency allowed to you by something like pandas or R. I have used it on a project for some time now and I'm very impressed by the flexibility afforded to the user and how quickly you can mash different data sources together and produce accurate summary statistics based on them.
This book gives a good introduction to the topic and helps you understand the internal logic of the DAX engine, a prerequisite for using PowerPivot well. Collie's breezy, conversational style lends itself surprisingly well to the material, even though he might go overboard with the smileys at times.
The material is tailored quite heavily towards producing sales reports. It spends a considerable amount of time on things like custom calendars and time intelligence. Not a drawback as such but you will probably need to supplement this book with other material at some point if you are planning to use it for things other than straight-forward sales data.
The PP community is truly fortunate to have such a friendly and inviting person like Collie fronting it. This book is a good buy and a good introduction to something that should be part of the arsenal of any committed Excel user.
This book gives a good introduction to the topic and helps you understand the internal logic of the DAX engine, a prerequisite for using PowerPivot well. Collie's breezy, conversational style lends itself surprisingly well to the material, even though he might go overboard with the smileys at times.
The material is tailored quite heavily towards producing sales reports. It spends a considerable amount of time on things like custom calendars and time intelligence. Not a drawback as such but you will probably need to supplement this book with other material at some point if you are planning to use it for things other than straight-forward sales data.
The PP community is truly fortunate to have such a friendly and inviting person like Collie fronting it. This book is a good buy and a good introduction to something that should be part of the arsenal of any committed Excel user.
May 26, 2015
Nice book to get you up and running. I had read some other material and came away with an incomplete understanding. On the other hand, having that information in my back pocket may have allowed this book to shine brighter than if I didn't already know some of the areas that were murky. Regardless, any Excel user that relies heavily on vlookup and confirms they have access to the powerpivot add-in (a small subset of Excel users), you should definitely get this book.
October 10, 2013
Incredibly useful and amazing well-written!
January 17, 2015
Got me started with PowerPivot.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews