

You got a large amount of data which you want to evaluate in a PivotTable. In such case, Excel crashes often or gets very slow. Fortunately, Microsoft provides a solution. PowerPivot is an Excel add-in which can handle huge amounts of data. Unfortunately, only the newer versions of Excel in the ProPlus package got it included. For older version of Excel (2010 or before) you can still download it for free.
Contents
Roughly speaking, PowerPivot offers a way to use a PivotTable on very large data sets. PowerPivot jumps in when normal PivotTables would pass out already. Often, Microsoft Access would be the better choice to analyse such huge amounts of data. But many Excel users have never used Access before. In such case, PowerPivot provides a good opportunity to consolidate your data before further analyzing it with Excel.
As it has been pointed out in the comments section of this post, since Excel 2013 PowerPivot is only available for the ProPlus versions of Office. So if you are running Excel 2010, please consider upgrading to 2013 or 2016 well.
Activate the PowerPivot add-in in Excel
If you got Excel 2013 or 2016 ProPlus, PowerPivot is already built-in. If you can’t see the PowerPivot ribbon, please activate it within the Options. Therefore, follow these steps:
If you got Excel 2010 or older, you can download PowerPivot from the Microsoft Website for free. Go to this website, select your language and click Download. If you got the 64 bit version of Excel (here is how you can check which version you got) download the link having “64” written in it. If you got the 32 bit version you must choose the file haven x86 in it.
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Using PowerPivot is quite straight-forward. Just follow these quick steps (the numbers refer to the picture).
Steps for using PowerPivot
When the import of data is done, you can use the Pivot functions as for normal Pivot tables.
Start by clicking “Manage” on the PowerPivot ribbon.
PowerPivot allows to import various types of data, including Excel tables itself. If you want to get data from another Excel file, click on Get External Data –> From Other Sources –> Scroll down –> Excel File.
Here is the list of all possible sources:
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Comments 2
Will
I’ve used this a few times with various datasets. Very helpful. Thanks and good job keeping us informed.
Eric C
It’s worth mentioning that only the Excel 2013 ProPlus edition has PowerPivot.