1. Annoyed with a stubborn pivot table? PowerPivot is your answer.
SQL Saturday Austin 2019
Annoyed with a stubborn pivot table?
PowerPivot is your answer.

2. Introduction Toni Haag (Toni.Haag@CHRobinson.com)
Business Analyst at C.H. Robinson
President of CHRWomen
MBA & MS Analytics candidate from UTD (Dec 2019!!)

3. PowerPivot What is it? Quick introduction
Excel Add-In which uses DAX functions like PowerBI
Great way to make a complicated dashboard without having it look messy
Can get data from connection with SQL server or many other sources

4. Annoyances Agenda
Your boss won’t approve the costs to get PowerBI Desktop
You’re not a coder, so learning R/Python sounds super scary
You add some columns to your data and now your file is too big
You add a value and the grand total makes no reasonable sense
Your average between two dates is – huh?
You add a date to a pivot table and the months are alphabetical
You add a graph to your dash, but have to add a hidden table, too
You want to add 2 pivot tables with different column widths
We’ll walk through 8 common annoyances in dashboard building that can be solved with a little PowerPivot skills

5. Annoyance #1: Your boss won’t approve the costs to get PowerBI Desktop
Both PowerBI and Excel PowerPivot use DAX formulas
So, learning Excel PowerPivot now will help you with PowerBI Desktop later

6. Annoyance #2: You’re not a coder, so learning R/Python sounds super scary
DAX is indeed a coding language for Excel and PowerBI
However, it’s closely related to formulas in Microsoft Excel, so if you’re already a pro with VLOOKUP and SUMIF, it’s an easy transition
Excel: =VLOOKUP(A1,$B$1:$B$10,1,FALSE)
DAX: =LOOKUPVALUE(Holidays[HolidayDescription],Holidays[HolidayDate],Data[Date])

7. Annoyance #3: You add some columns to your data and now your file is TOO BIG
Power Pivot is an in-memory data modelling component that enables highly-compressed data storage and extremely fast aggregation and calculation[1]
Writing formulas in DAX over basic Excel is much more efficient, so your file size will shrink AND your spreadsheet will load faster

8. Annoyance #4: You add a VALUE and the grand total makes no reasonable sense
=CALCULATE() is your new best friend!
Use calculate in both calculated fields and measures to manipulate aggregations to make them do exactly what you want them to
Other cool functions to check out:
=ALL()
=ALLEXCEPT()
=FILTER()

9. Annoyance #5: Your average between two dates is 2.6166667 – huh?
Reformat “ ” to “2 hrs 37 mins” by using a combination of =CONCATENATE(), =ROUNDDOWN(), and =ROUND()
After reformatting, though, now it treats that field like text, so how do I do things like conditional formatting?

10. Annoyance #6: You add a date to a pivot table and the months are alphabetical
It’s nice to have the month names like “January,” “February,” etc., but Excel treats them like text and sorts them in alphabetical order
Sort them in the right order by using the “Sort by Column” button in PowerPivot
Also useful for putting things in a specific order, i.e. sorting the top 10 carrier names in ranked order with an “other carriers” bucket as the 11th item in the list

11. Annoyance #7: You add a graph to your dash, but have to add a hidden table, too
Without PowerPivot, to add a graph, you: 1. add a pivot table, 2. create a graph from the pivot table – but then what do you do with the original pivot table?
With PowerPivot, you can just add a graph without having a pivot table first
Create just like you would a normal pivot table with the field list

12. Annoyance #8: You want to add 2 pivot tables with different column widths
Add the pivot tables to a separate tab then copy and paste as a linked picture
This pastes the pivot table as a picture that you can resize as needed and the picture of the pivot table will still get any refreshed data updates!
Useful when the pivot tables you want to add to your dashboard have different amounts of columns or different column widths

13. BONUS CONTENT
Set the print area for the user in case they print to PDF
Edit the slicers to make the content in them fit more nicely
# of columns
Font size
Moving objects and changing column widths after a refresh can be annoying:
Right-click on a pivot table and choose “Pivot Table Options” to turn off “autofit column widths on update”
Right-click on a slicer or graph and choose “Size and Properties” to select “Don’t move or size with cells”
Right-click on a button on a graph to hide all field buttons on graphs

14. Microsoft documentation for DAX formulas is super helpful if you want to know what a formula does
reference
Stackoverflow is great if you’re looking for help with complicated nested formulas (i.e. SUMIFS in DAX)
How to Search for help
Microsoft Documentation
Stackoverflow
Google, Bing, etc.

15. References
powerquery-and-powerbi