Analyzing and Visualizing Sales & Marketing Data – Part 2: Setting up and loading data

Now we will be doing all of our data analysis and modelling in Power Pivot. 

So first things first. To enable Power Pivot in Excel, go to File -> Options -> Add-ins

In the Manage section at the bottom, choose COM Add-ins -> Go -> and then make sure you select Microsoft Power Pivot for Excel. 

Once it’s enabled, you will find it part of the ribbons on the top.

To open a new Power Pivot window, choose Manage from the Power Pivot ribbon.
 
Once the Power Pivot window is open, you can load data into it from the different sources shown in the “Get External Data” section.

Now we shall load the sample you downloaded from Part 1
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First you choose from Database, then from Access.

Now browse to where you have saved the Access DB file, then click Next.

Since we are not going to manipulate the data in the Access DB or do any queries to it, we select the first option "Select from a list of tables...", then click next. 

We select all the tables from the Access DB as shown, and click Finish. Each of these tables contain different kind of information that we will need in our modelling.

Make sure that all the tables are loaded without failures. 

Can you see how many rows per table have been loaded? Amazing, right?
 
Once the tables are loaded, you can view them as tables (each table in a separate tab) the same way you view it on Excel. Now skim through each table quickly to understand more about the data it has.

So now we have seen how to enable PowerPivot in Excel and how to load data into it from an Access Database. Data can come to PowerPivot from many other sources that we will cover in other posts. ​
In the next part, we will look at how to create connections (or relationships) among the loaded tables.