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Overview of Adding Data to Your PowerPivot Workbook (Tutorial)

As with any Excel workbook, in PowerPivot for Excel you can add data from a wide variety of data sources, including: a relational database, a multidimensional database, data feeds, an Excel table, or a Reporting Services report. You can also add data from files on your local computer, and use data that you download from the Web.

However, unlike Excel, you can then create relationships between these data to form a single data set, and then perform analyses against this data. You are not limited to one million rows either -- PowerPivot enables you to add and work with millions of rows of data locally, depending on the actual physical memory available on your desktop computer.

What You Will Learn

PowerPivot supports importing data from a variety of sources, including: SQL Server databases, Analysis Services cubes, Access databases, Excel worksheets, text files, data feeds, and more. For a full list of supported data sources, see Data Sources Supported in PowerPivot Workbooks.

In most cases, you will use the Table Import Wizard to import data. The wizard guides you through the process of setting up a connection to a data source and choosing what data to import, including selecting a subset of the rows and columns in the data source. When importing data from a database, the wizard also enables you to specify a custom query to import exactly the data that you want.

You can also import data by pasting it from an Excel worksheet or by linking directly to an Excel worksheet. In the following topics, you will see how to use the Table Import Wizard and these other methods.

  1. Add Data by using the Table Import Wizard (Tutorial)

  2. Add Data by using a Custom Query (Tutorial)

  3. Add Data by using Copy and Paste (Tutorial)

  4. Add Data by using an Excel Linked Table (Tutorial)

Next Step

To continue this tutorial, go to the next topic: Add Data by using the Table Import Wizard (Tutorial).