How to Get the Excel Power Pivot Add-in

Power Pivot gives you the power of business insights and analytics app. You don’t need specialized training to develop data models and perform calculations. You just need to enable it before you can use it.

Follow Along with the Tutorial

When you want to get up and running with Power Pivot quickly, learn by example. Microsoft has several example datasets available as a free download, which contain the raw data, the Data Model, and examples of data analysis. These are great learning tools that provide insight into how professionals analyze big data. This tutorial uses the Microsoft Student Data Model sample workbook. You’ll find a download link to the sample workbook and to a completed data model in the first note on the page. The data in this sample Excel workbook has the following:

The workbook contains four worksheets. Each worksheet contains related data, meaning there’s at least one column heading on a worksheet matching a column heading in another worksheet. The data in each worksheet is formatted as a table. Every cell in the table contains data. There are no blank cells, rows, or columns in the tables.

There are other example datasets on the Microsoft website. Explore these learning resources:

Download data from a Microsoft Access database that describes Olympic Medals. Download three Business Intelligence samples that show how to use Power Pivot to import data, create relationships, build PivotTables, and design PivotCharts.

How to Add Data to Your Excel File and Build a Data Model

You’ve collected the data you’ll need. Now it’s time to import your data sets into Excel and automatically create a Data Model. A Data Model is similar to a relational database and provides the tabular data used in PivotTables and PivotCharts. To import Excel data into a Power Pivot Data Model:

Create Relationships Between Tables with Power Pivot Excel

Now that you have a Data Model, it’s time to create relationships between each of the data tables.

How to Create PivotTables 

When you use Power Pivot to create a Data Model, most of the hard work involving PivotTables and PivotCharts has been done for you. The relationships you created between the tables in your dataset are used to add the fields you’ll use to create PivotTables and PivotCharts.

Convert a PivotTable into a PivotChart

If you want to visualize your PivotTable data, turn a PivotTable into a PivotChart. 

Create PivotCharts

If you’d rather analyze your data in a visual format, create a PivotChart.