Model and a database link

In one of previous recipes I described how to make an Excel database connection. Similarly you can create a connection between Data model and various data sources. Main difference is in fact that Data model uses technologies for compressing data, during their import, and decompressing them only when used in the report, which saves memory and allows you to work with large amounts of data. You can create a link to a single table, multiple tables or to a data set made by running SQL queries.

Linking data in the model

When you start using Excel business intelligence tools you’ll realize that they enable connecting with data from multiple sources. This can be an Excel spreadsheet or text files, databases, data from the Internet, data warehouse “in the cloud” … If you have ever used MS Access, you will easily understand how to add and link tables within the model. If not, read this article and you will see that it is easy and quite intuitive task.

Data model

Data model is used to add and connect tables in a whole, in order to retrieve the data needed for reporting. This is a pseudo-base, part of Excel document. By adding a table into the Model data are automatically compressed; later, when we need them for reporting, they are decompressed and used as a reporting dimension in the pivot table. Data model is basis for use of “Power” technologies, i.e. “self-service” business intelligence tools.

Current prices

The catalog is a list of items associated with prices that and, by rule, it should not be changed more than once a day. In practice it is formed by consecutive adding codes of items, dates and prices in the table. How to find the last (current) price? Although at first glance it seems simple, this can be a considerable brain teaser. Also, this is an excellent demonstration of the practical application of formulas containing arrays and one of the “recipes” you will surely like.

Statistical analysis of wages

In one of the earlier „recipes“ I briefly described the statistical functions in Excel. My knowledge of statistics is quite modest (one of these days will probably take some additional lessons to improve my knowledge). However, I would like to dedicate one article to this area. On a practical case, the analysis of wages in a small company, I’ll show you how you can use these functions to make you come up with some interesting conclusions.