We've rewritten our Power Pivot courseware and exercises

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We've revamped our entire Power Pivot courseware
Excel's Power Pivot add-in allows you to create pivot tables based upon multiple linked tables, gets round any Excel spreadsheet row limit and lets you create new statistics using a language called DAX. We've rewritten and relaunched our two-day Power Pivot course to celebrate all this!

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 July 2025

In this blog

What is Power Pivot?
What did the course rewrite involve?
Enabling Power Pivot

We've revamped and relaunched our two-day Introduction to Power Pivot course - this blog gives the details!

What is Power Pivot?

Power Pivot (not PowerPivot; somewhere along the line it gained a space) is an Excel add-in which gives you the following advantages:

Feature	Description
Multiple tables	A pivot table based on a Power Pivot data model can include columns from multiple different tables.
Table size	Tables in a Power Pivot data model can have approximately 2 billion rows and columns.
Measures	You can use DAX to create much more complicated and useful calculations than using Excel formulae alone.

What did the course rewrite involve?

We first taught Power Pivot in 2013, so our course was showing its age. We've now rewritten it, including the following new courseware:

Type of courseware	Details
Manual	You can see a sample chapter from our new Power Pivot manual here.
Exercises	We have many new exercises which you can try online.

Our Power Pivot course also includes a section of working with Power Query to import and clean data before adding it to your data model.

Enabling Power Pivot

If you want to have a quick look at Power Pivot to see if it's for you, you'll need to enable the add-in first:

You won't be able to run Power Pivot unless you can see it in your Excel ribbon.

To do this, from the Excel ribbon choose File | Options. On the dialog box which appears, choose Add-ins:

Click on the Add-ins option.

You can then choose to show COM Add-ins:

Choose this drop-down then click on Go....

You can then tick the box to enable Power Pivot!

Enabling the Power Pivot add-in in Microsoft Excel

Check the box next to Microsoft Power Pivot for Excel then click OK.

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