Monday, January 21, 2013

Excel 2013 & PowerPivot: Multiple Copies of a Calculated Measure for use with "Show Values As" Analysis

I've been working with Excel 2013 more and more recently, and have to say I'm impressed with all of the enhancements the product team pulled together.  Especially in the BI area.  All the hard work up in Redmond is definitely paying off.  PowerPivot is continuing to mature and become more smoothly integrated with Excel.  And the Excel analytics features keep getting better.  Not to mention the addition of PowerView.

I wanted to do a few posts and share my thoughts on some of the things that I really like and think are particularly useful when working with PowerPivot models and building visualizations in Excel.  Lots of improvements that make it easier and faster to get from raw data to insights.  And allow users / analysts to spend less time and less clicks building and more time analyzing and exploring.

So for this first one, I'll focus on the ability to use multiple copies of the same PowerPivot calculated measure in a given pivot table or pivot chart.  This is something I really needed early last year on a dashboard effort, so when I saw this in Excel2013, I was stoked to say the least.