Excel is no doubt a great tool in large and small bussinesses. Excel’s ease of use lets users build their own tool, with or without the help of a IT expert. In my organization, Excel spreadsheets play essential role in the day-to-day functions of the business, such as trading in the stock market and managing their portfolios, calculating complex financial formulae, etc. However, these spreadsheets are fragile, do not adopt to changing business requirements, and need constant maintenance. And the scary thing is that only one person (in most cases) — the spreadsheet’s creator—really understand how the application works. Sometimes this might make the creator a bottleneck to the business workflow. In worst case scenarios, business function could halt if the creator were unavailable for some reason or if the application were corrupted or accidentally deleted, and could be very serious, especially if there were a major problem restoring the application.
PowerPivot for Excel 2010 in SQL Server 2008 R2 managed self-service business intelligence (BI) (formerly known by its code name “Gemini”) [ more about PowerPivot at http://www.powerpivot.com ] can handle such situations. It empowers both IT and business users - the business users get to solve business problems with his/her familiar Excel and the IT team has the ability to centrally store, secure, and distribute the Excel spreadsheets throughout the organization using SharePoint.
The Excel component in Office 2010 uses a new storage engine which is built on the SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) OLAP engine. The new engine uses extreme data compression, and it enables Excel to work with hundreds of millions of rows with subsecond response time.
The following blog post describes how to use PowerPivot in Excel 2010.
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/10/23/using-powerpivot-with-excel-2010.aspx
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