Developing an Introductory Class in Business Intelligence (BI) Using MS Excel PowerPivot

Asking questions about your data is a constant application of all business organizations. To facilitate decision making and improve business performance, a business intelligence application must be an integral part of everyday management practices. Microsoft Excel added PowerPivot and PowerPivot officially to facilitate this process with minimum cost, knowing that many business people are already familiar with MS Excel. This paper will design an introductory class to business intelligence (BI) using Excel PowerPivot. If an educator decides to adopt this paper for teaching an introductory BI class, students should have previous familiarity with Excel's functions and formulas. This paper will focus on four significant phases all students need to complete in a three-credit class. First, students must understand the process of achieving small database normalization and how to bring these tables to Excel or develop them directly within Excel PowerPivot. This paper will walk the reader through these steps to complete the task of creating the normalization, along with the linking and bringing the tables and their relationships to excel. Second, an introduction to Data Analysis Expression (DAX) will be discussed. [For the full proceedings, see ED592847.]