PowerPivot | Calendars exercise | Create and Use a Calendar Column for your Star Sign

This exercise is provided to allow potential course delegates to choose the correct Wise Owl Microsoft training course, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any format without the prior written consent of Wise Owl.

You can learn how to do this exercise on the relevant Wise Owl classroom training course (sadly for the moment only in the UK).

Software ==> PowerPivot  (75 exercises)
Version ==> Excel 2010 and later
Topic ==> Calendars  (1 exercise)
Level ==> Average difficulty
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The idea behind this exercise is to create a pivot table showing how many dates there are for Pisces, as opposed to other star signs:

Dates counted by star sign

Pisces goes from 19th February to 19th March.  It's only an approximation - if you're born on the cusp of Pisces and some other inferior star sign, things get tricky.

 

You can do this exercise in either Excel or SQL Server Managment Studio.  Just follow the instructions under the appropriate heading below!

Excel Instructions

Create a calendar table for all of the dates in the year 2000:

Calendar of star signs and dates

The function used to give the star sign could be: =IF(MONTH([@Date]-19)=2,"Pisces","Inferior star sign") .

 

Save this workbook as Star signs.  You must then close it down to import it into PowerPivot. 

Use Other Data Sources to import this table, and then create the pivot table as shown above.  Save this as Not all can be winners - Excel, and close this down.

SQL Instructions

Create a calendar table in Management Studio to hold the dates (you might as well do it within the MAM database).  You could do this in script using:

CREATE TABLE tblStarSignDates(

[Date] datetime PRIMARY KEY,

StarSign varchar(20)

)

Add in one row for each date in 2000.  To save typing the rows in one by one, you could use something like:

-- start with 1st Jan 2000

DECLARE @curdate datetime = '20000101'

 

-- add dates one row at a time

WHILE @curdate <=>'20001231'

BEGIN

 

-- add a record for this date

INSERT INTO tblStarSignDates (

[Date],

[StarSign]

) VALUES (

@curdate,

CASE

WHEN Month(@curdate-19) = 2 THEN 'Pisces'

ELSE 'Inferior star sign'

END

)

 

-- go on to next date

SET @curdate = DateAdd(day,1,@curdate)

 

END

Import this table, and use it to create the pivot table as shown above.  Save this as Not all can be winners - SQL, then close it down.

You can unzip this file to see the answers to this exercise, although please remember this is for your personal use only.
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