Building Data Relationships in PowerPivot

This post is a follow-up to one of my previous posts, titled: “Using PowerPivot’s Copy-Paste Support for Importing Data from Word” and this time, we will be discussing about building data relationships in PowerPivot.

To this end, in this post we will see how we can import data from Microsoft Word using PowerPivot’s copy-paste feature, create relationships on the data and perform aggregations that is BI! 🙂

For example, consider the two following tables which exist in a sample Word document:

The business query is to evaluate the sales activity for all the salesmen and decide possible adjustments to their commissions.

Using the Copy-Paste Feature

To do this in PowerPivot, we are going to use the copy-paste feature, create a relationship for the two tables’ data, and visually build our business query using the user-friendly interface and tools of PowerPivot.

The first step is to import the data from Word right into Excel using PowerPivot. So first, we have to launch Excel 2010 and then start the PowerPivot environment:

Then, we copy the first table from the Word document into clipboard and we click on the “To New Table” button.

After previewing the data and clicking on the “OK” button, we see that the first table’s data are imported into PowerPivot:

After the preview, we can see that the second table’s data are imported into PowerPivot:

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Creating the Table Relationships

Based on the sales activity of each salesman and on the results of the aggregations as illustrated in the two above charts, we derive to the conclusion that Salesman 3 should get the larger commission rate, then Salesman 1 followed by Salesman 2 and last Salesman 4 who has the less sales activity.

This post provided a simple example on how we can import data right into Excel using PowerPivot’s copy-paste feature, create relationships on the data and perform BI with ease by using the powerful engine of SQL Server PowerPivot.

I hope you found this post useful!