A Peek Inside: Where’s the beef?

You have seen all of the cool demos – millions of rows of data in a single workbook. It is the hallmark of many PowerPivot keynote and session demos at conferences these days. It is way cool to see that much data being moved around so easily. The obvious question (which us technical geeks get all of the time) is: “Wow! That is way cool. So where is the data?“ In this “A Peek Inside", we will show you. The answer is that it’s in there — and by “there”, I mean in the workbook. Really? How can that be true? That seems very strange. This is a database, right?” But it is not; it is part of a new way of looking at data that we feel very passionate about here in PowerPivot-land. We call it: “a document-centric view of data.” By this we mean that the workbook is the data; the data is the workbook. There is no hidden database out in the world that contains the data. It is all there in the workbook. There is no ‘delete’ operation on the data – if you want to delete the data, you delete the workbook. If you want to archive the workbook along with its matching other Office documents, such as a project plan, or MS Word specification, or whatever, you just copy and archive the workbook and you have the data at the same time. PowerPivot has a document-centric view of the data.

As I was getting ready to show you all of this in a series of screen shots when I noticed that Denny Lee has already done that. Take a look at his posting here:

http://powerpivottwins.com/2009/11/07/for-excel-powerpivot-the-database-is-in-the-workbook/

He also shows a cool trick to find out which columns are taking the most amount of space in your database. I’ll add a link to that as well.

http://powerpivottwins.com/2009/11/07/understanding-why-an-excel-powerpivot-workbook-is-so-large/

So we come to the end of the story – and we had geek’ie fun doing it

Till next time.