Excel PowerPivot
A new tool that will be making a big impact on business people is the Excel PowerPivot add in which is available for Excel 2010 and later versions. It has been described as the best thing to happen to Excel in years.
Effectively it addresses all the shortfalls of traditional Pivot Tables and adds extra functionality. In terms of Business Intelligence it is now possible to do sophisticated analysis with the tool that is already on your computer.
The added benefit is that it is based on Excel and is so similar that there is very little new to learn. We have shown the differences between Excel and PowerPivot here .
If you need to work with datasets that have more than 100 000 rows (and up to 100 million rows) and/ or you need to combine various data sets to create new business intelligence then you must start to learn about this tool.