My Power Pivot Journey

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From beginner to expert, read all about my Power Pivot Journey at PowerPivotPro or watch below. How I started off as an Excel user but went on to build large scale BI systems using Power Pivot.

2 thoughts on “My Power Pivot Journey”

  1. So Avichal,
    If you took a 120 MB xltm file that had a power Pivot Model created via a PowerQuery pulling data from a Access DB/ or SQL Server(if you are lucky) / Some other database(s) and kept it on a shared folder and then created a short cut to the file and shared that short cut to 500 + users so that all of them could simultaneously open the file and if you had written a single line of in VBA in workbook open event code (Excel 2013) to refresh the Power Pivot Model (more lines in 2010) would you still need a very expensive SharePoint Server or the SSAS tabular model – both of which are something a “business” user can never get without IT

    • Sam,
      I agree with your sentiment. If you can get away without running the server, that’s probably best.
      But the server side does come with some benefits.

      • Room to grow. Our model grew to 3GB in size and was still growing at a fast clip. One of our sources was adding a million+ rows per day. And we were not worried at all 🙂
      • Core and Thin (or Hub and Spoke): Your model can be as large as you need to be, but the reports in Excel/Power View can be wafer thin (File Sizes in KBs not MBs or GBs). When reports are that fast to open and use they get used more often

      There are also some finer points, explained in more detail in this post Migrating From Power Pivot to Analysis Services Tabular Model

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