Along with Excel 2010, Microsoft released a free add-in called PowerPivot. According to MS,
PowerPivot gives users the power to create compelling self-service BI solutions, facilitates sharing and collaboration on user-generated BI solutions in a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment, and enables IT organizations to increase operational efficiencies through Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2-based management tools.
It means anyone can analyze and visualize millions of rows of data using powerpivot. It is like pivot tables on SUMPRODUCT (oh, I could totally say steroids, but who wants a cliche on a Friday?)
During the holidays I spent few hours trying to understand this whole powerpivot thing and see if it really wears underwear on top of pants.
Watch my review of Power Pivot in below video
If you are not able to see it here, watch it on youtube.
(make sure you jack up your volume).
The Conclusion
My experience with PowerPivot has been good so far. I like the power behind powerpivot and its ability to facilitate very good analysis on large datasets without leaving excel sheets. The only gripe I have is that it slows down Excel 2010 start up time. I have disabled the add-in for the time being. But I will turn it on as soon as I need to analyze some data from a SQL server DB.
Download PowerPivot Free Add-in
If you have Excel 2010 you can download the powerpivot add-in right away and see it for yourself.
If you don’t have Excel 2010, download that too.
What is your experience with PowerPivot?
Have you tried it? What is your experience like?
13 Responses to “Data Validation using an Unsorted column with Duplicate Entries as a Source List”
Pivot Table will involve manual intervention; hence I prefer to use the 'countif remove duplicate trick' along with 'text sorting formula trick; then using the offset with len to name the final range for validation.
if using the pivot table, set the sort to Ascending, so the list in the validation cell comes back alphabetically.
Hui: Brillant neat idea.
Vipul: I am intrigued by what you are saying. Please is it possible to show us how it can be done, because as u said Hui's method requires user intervention.
Thks to PHD and all
K
Table names dont work directly inside Data validation.
You will have to define a name and point it to the table name and then use the name inside validation
Eg MyClient : Refers to :=Table1[Client]
And then in the list validation say = MyClient
Kieranz,
Pls download the sample here http://cid-e98339d969073094.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/data-validation-unsorted-list-example.xls
Off course there are many other ways of doing the same and integrating the formulae in multiple columns into one.
Pls refer to column FGHI in that file. Cell G4 is where my validation is.
Vipul:
Many thks, will study it latter.
Rgds
K
[...] to chandoo for the idea of getting unique list using Pivot tables. What we do is that create a pivot table [...]
@Vipul:
Thanks, that was awesome! 🙂
@Playercharlie Happy to hear that 🙂
Great contribution, Hui. Solved a problem of many years!
Thanks to you, A LOT
Hi Hui,
Greeting
hope you are doing well.
I'm interested to send you a private vba excel file which i need to show detail of pivot in new workbook instead of showing in same workbook as new sheet.
Please contact me on muhammed.ye@gmail.com
Best Regards