I was speaking with one of our great Dynamics GP Partners today and mentioned the word “PowerPivot” on the call as though I assumed he (and everyone else in the Microsoft community) knew what I was talking about.  I shouldn’t have been surprised to find out he hadn’t heard of this yet, as now that I look back through our blog posts and communications to our Customers and Partners, we haven’t done a great job of telling everyone about THE NEXT BIG THING when it comes to Microsoft Office 2010 (at least for you spreadsheet junkies out there).  That next big thing is PowerPivot for Excel 2010, or what many inside of Microsoft affectionately refer to as “Pivot Tables on Steroids!”

Go to http://www.powerpivot.com/videos.aspx and scroll through the videos to check out the powerful capabilities this tool has.  Here are my two favorite videos that many Dynamics GP customers should love! (btw, when they say “Gemini” in some of the videos…this is PowerPivot.  Gemini was the code name!):

  • See how PowerPivot can INSTANTLY filter over 100 MILLION rows in the “Handling big data in PowerPivot for Excel” video. I am still amazed every time I see this demo live or on the web!
  • Watch PowerPivot treat existing SQL Reporting Services reports as data sources within a PowerPivot workbook under the “Reports as data sources in PowerPivot for Excel” video.  You’ll have over 400 Excel+SSRS reports in GP 2010 you can automatically import into PowerPivot to do deeper analysis on!
  • While not a video, I also find the PowerPivot Gallery feature of SharePoint 2010 quite cool as well.  Read more here on the PowerPivot team blog.

You can actually download PowerPivot for Excel in Beta format today, but it does require the Microsoft Office 2010 beta be installed.  The tool will be free for users to download and use on their own computers.  If you want to share a PowerPivot workbook with multiple users or departments, then you can send that up to Office SharePoint Server with just a few clicks!

Pretty powerful stuff…be sure to check it out!

AndyW