What’s new in PowerPivot v2?

Pivotstream is the first company to release a Cloud PowerPivot solution back in 2010.  In July 2012, PowerPivot v2 was released.  PowerPivot helps mid to large companies aggregate billions of rows of data of disparate information to be used for analysis in business operations.

Two shortfalls of the early version of PowerPivot was the inability to create multiple relationships between tables.  Users were able to work around those issues, but version two allows for multiple relationships between tables.

Secondly, grouping based on hierarchies is innate to pivot tables by default.  But PowerPivot v2 allows for creating hierarchies in advance making building the pivot table easier, especially when dealing with information that contains many levels.  Now, users can take a huge list of items and group them into summary levels that can then be drilled down in and searched.  This makes accessing subcategories of information much more sufficient and targeted.  (See a workbook illustration here.)

Here are some other new features of PowerPivot v2:

• Diagram View: Makes changing relationships and hierarchies easier by allowing you to view the tables in a more organized way
• Reporting Properties: Allows you to customize the information to be shown in a report format, add details and set an image URL
• Add Values to Rows and Columns: Self explanatory, prior version of PowerPivot did not allow for values to be added to rows and columns but v2 does
• Relationship in Diagram View: This allows you to create relationships between columns in separate tables and displays the relationship so that you can easily see how the tables relate to each other
• Sort by Other Column: Instead of sorting alphabetically, you can sort by other columns that you have created
• Calculation Area: You can view calculations in a grid to manage calculations and Key Performance Indicators
• Advanced Tab: Advanced features are now in a separate tab
• DAX Function/User Relationship Function: Enhances relationship feature by allowing the user to specify multiple relationships to be used in a particular formula
• Blob Support: Blob data is detected automatically and accepted as binary data

There are other features of PowerPivot v2.  See more here.