Refreshing PowerPivot Data

If you remember my Intro to PowerPivot post, you’ll recall that every organization has that power user who leveraged the tools he had on hand, mostly Excel, to do their own form of Business Intelligence. One headache that plagued “that guy” was the freshness of data. It could be quite difficult to keep the data

If you remember my Intro to PowerPivot post, you’ll recall that every organization has that power user who leveraged the tools he had on hand, mostly Excel, to do their own form of Business Intelligence. One headache that plagued “that guy” was the freshness of data. It could be quite difficult to keep the data used in his or her spreadsheets up to date. One of the great boons that PowerPivot offers is the ability to quickly and easily refresh data.

Once again let’s return to the Excel 2010 spreadsheet we created in my Combining Data from Multiple Sources in PowerPivot. In this example we’ll put ourselves in the role of a salesperson, creating an analysis for one of our best customers, one Lucy Harrington. Going to the Customer tab in our PowerPivot workbook, we click on the drop down menu for the FirstName column. Clear the “Select All” option then scroll down and only check the first name “Lucy” which should be sufficient to find only the customer we wish.

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