Power Pivot And Power Bi: Bill Jelen

Power Pivot and Power BI: The Excel User's Guide to DAX, Power Query, Power BI & Power Pivot in Excel 2010-2016

Power Pivot is a powerful data analysis tool developed by Microsoft. It allows users to create data models, perform advanced data analysis, and create interactive dashboards. With Power Pivot, you can easily connect to various data sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, and cloud services, and create a single data model that can be used across multiple reports and dashboards.

When Microsoft launched , they built it on the same engine as Power Pivot. Bill Jelen saw this immediately: Power BI was essentially Excel’s Power Pivot engine untethered from the spreadsheet and wrapped in a beautiful, interactive visualization layer. bill jelen power pivot and power bi

But around 2010, Jelen noticed a seismic shift. The traditional Excel grid—the endless rows and columns that birthed the "Spreadsheet from Hell"—was hitting a wall. The data was getting too big, the relationships were too complex, and VLOOKUPs were crashing workbooks left and right.

Jelen often frames his teaching of Power Pivot as the moment Excel users graduate from "Spreadsheets" to "Business Intelligence." In his seminars, he performs a magic trick that he has repeated thousands of times: he takes a workbook that is wheezing under the weight of massive VLOOKUP tables, deletes the formulas entirely, and rebuilds it in Power Pivot using Relationships . Power Pivot and Power BI: The Excel User's

The ability to create relationships between different data sets without using slow VLOOKUP functions.

He calls this the "Better Together" strategy. Jelen argues that Power BI didn't kill Excel; it supercharged it. Excel is the world's most popular data entry and ad-hoc analysis tool, while Power BI is the world's best presentation layer for that data. When Microsoft launched , they built it on

Suddenly, the 50-megabyte file is 5 megabytes. The calculation that took five minutes happens instantly.