Specifications

192 CHAPTER 10 Self-Service Analysis with PowerPivot
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IBM DB2 8.1
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Sybase
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Any database that can be accessed by using an OLE DB provider or an ODBC driver
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Files
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Delimited text les (.txt, .tab, and .csv)
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Files from Excel 97 through Excel 2010
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PowerPivot workbooks published to a PowerPivot-enabled Microsoft SharePoint
Server 2010 farm
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Data feeds
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SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Atom data feeds
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SharePoint lists
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ADO.NET Data Services
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Commercial datasets, such as Microsoft Codename “Dallas”
(http://pinpoint.com/en-US/Dallas)
TIP A new feature in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services is the ability to export an
Atom data feed for any report, whether you export from a native mode or from an inte-
grated mode report server. If the PowerPivot client is installed on your computer when you
perform the export, PowerPivot detects the document type and opens a wizard for you
to use to import the data directly into a table. You might nd it benecial to get some of
your data integrated in a report rst and take advantage of Reporting Services’ support for
calculations, aggregations, data sources, and refresh schedules before you bring the data
into PowerPivot.
The wizard walks you through the process of specifying connection information for the
source and selecting data to import. If your source is a database, you can choose to select
either tables or views or to provide a query for the data selection. Regardless of the data
source type, the wizard gives you two options for ltering the data before you import it. First,
you can select specic columns rather than importing every column from the source table.
Second, you can apply a lter to a column to select the row values to include in the import. By
applying these ltering options, you can eliminate unnecessary overhead in your workbook,
reducing both the le size of the workbook and the amount of time necessary to refresh and
recalculate the workbook.
TIP When you are working with large datasets, you should use the ltering options to
import only the columns you need for analysis. By limiting the workbook to the essential
columns, you can import more rows of data.