MS Excel power pivot for SAP BW

Let's face it, dashboard presentation design matters and you can get fancy with PowerPivot. PowerPivot can be seriously fun, functional and powerful - especially with upcoming Hadoop ODBC and Hive Query Add-In. Here are a few creative ideas to spice up your dashboards. To add maps you can use free Microsoft Labs "Layerscape"  Geospatial Mapping Add-In for Excel,   Excel shapes with conditional color formatting or a third party add-in like MapCite.

As most of the companies are already into MS office, ELSOP can provide you a way to analyse your SAP BW ir SAP ERP data, in a fantastic and sexy way without any additional license.

PowerPivot is a plug in for Excel that you can download and install for free from Microsoft (it comes standard in Excel 2013). It provides end-users with an in-memory column based OLAP tool that runs on their PC (think “SAP HANA on a Windows PC”). You import data from various data sources (and this is one of the main advantages) into PowerPivot and then use the familiar Excel front-end to build your reports with Pivot Table like functionality. The Excel based report is published to the Microsoft SharePoint Portal where the data is refreshed (through a scheduler) and from where the users can download the reports onto their PC’s into Excel; or they can use Microsoft Power View (a component in SharePoint) to view the reports.

As I said before, when we first looked at PowerPivot we were blown away by the power and flexibility provided by the combination of PowerPivot, Excel and SharePoint and the ability to import and combine data from a number of disparate Data Sources. The only real drawback we could see was its ability to integrate with SAP. “Not a problem”, we were told by the Microsoft engineer. According to Microsoft, there are a number of ways that you can integrate data from SAP into Excel such as Business Objects Analysis (BOA) and OLE DB for SAP BW. From there you then import the data into PowerPivot and all your problems are history.

You can Analyze your SAP ERP or SAP BW data in three different landscape:

• Pivot Tables in MS excel
• Power pivot in MS excel.
• Power Pivot in MS Sharepoint
• Power view in MS sharepoint.