PowerPivot and DAX papers,posts,FAQs,webcasts,samples

Do you want to test what PowerPivot can do, but cannof find data that you could use for your tests and blog about? Might I suggest for you a few websites:

• Microsoft Contoso BI Demo Dataset for Retail Industry - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database backup. The Contoso BI Demo dataset is used to demonstrate DW/BI functionalities across the entire Microsoft Office product family. This dataset includes C-level, sales/marketing, IT, and common finance scenarios for the retail industry and support map integration. In addition, this dataset offers large volumes of transactions from OLTP and well-structured aggregations from OLAP, along with reference and dimension data.
• PowerPivot workbook with sample Contoso BI data. Includes white paper and sample DAX formulas.
• PowerPivot workbook samples from Microsoft. This PowerPivot for Excel 2010 Samples .exe file contains three Business Intelligence samples: (PowerPivot Healthcare Audit.xlsx , PowerPivot Tutorial Sample.xlsx  and LCA BI - Financial Report Usage.xlsx). These PowerPivot workbooks provide examples on how PowerPivot can be used to import data, create relationships, create calculated columns and measures, and add PivotTables, slicers and PivotCharts.
• PowerPivot Sample Data on Codeplex - This download includes a variety of data sources that you can use to complete the tutorial in the PowerPivot for Excel help documentation.
• Netflix data catalog
• Northwind database odata feed. Use following link in the PowerPivot "From data feeds": http://services.odata.org/Northwind/Northwind.svc/.
• InfoChimps - This is probably one of the best websites to get different data sets.They have free and paid data sets that looks very interesting. For example: Twitter census, NYSE Exchange data, DBPedia
• Codename "Dalas" - is Microsoft's Information Services business, enabling developers and information workers to instantly find, and manage datasets to power the next set of applications.
• Catalog to access U.S. Federal Executive Branch datasets. The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.
• Yahoo finance website. You can download stocks daily prices. Here is example for Microsoft stock
• Public Domain data from US government - Data sets from US government data , including data from the US Census International Database,  the World Factbook and from the USDA ERS data. This link was suggested by Dan English. 
• UK Economic data available for free online - Three sites for accessing free data (mainly macroeconomic) on the UK economy. The sites also contain some international data. This link was suggested by Dan English.
• UN Data. This link was suggested by Dan English.
• Stack Overflow Creative Commons Data Dump - The community has selflessly provided all this content in the spirit of sharing and helping each other. In that very same spirit, we are happy to return the favor by providing a database dump of public data.
• Statistics Netherlands. This link was suggested by Kasper de Jonge.
• Federal Aviation Administration data - (including the National Wildlife Aircraft Strike Database). This link was suggested by Dan English.
• Various datasets collected by "Data Wrangling". This link was suggested by Thiago Zavaschi.
• Public data from UK government.
• Data for neighbourhoods and Regenerations. (over 1100 datasets)
• The World bank data catalog.
. Use following link in the PowerPivot "From data Feeds": http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/. It took me over 3 hours to download this data set. There are 7 tables in this data set, biggest table is "Catalog Titles" with 125,000 records, so dataset is not big, but download speed is very slow.

I'll add more links as I discover them, but if you find any good website with interesting information, please send me and e-mail ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and I'll post your link here.