After the successful first edition in Amsterdam of the PowerPivot Workshop in December, we are planning to repeat this 2-day intensive course on PowerPivot in several other European countries (we are also evaluating one or two possible dates in US – please write me in case you are interested either as an individual or as a training company: we are making agreements for local deliveries of the same content).

All the information are available on a fresh nice website – and we will also use the #ppws twitter tag to give updated info about the workshop. We will start from London, on February 7-8, 2011 (and the early bird discount for London expires on January 17 – so hurry up!).

This is the list of the cities in our plan (I will update dates as soon as they are confirmed):

  • London, UK – February 7-8, 2011
  • Frankfurt, DE – February 21-22, 2011
  • Dublin, IE
  • Zurich, CH
  • Copenhagen, DK
  • Vienna, AT
  • Stockholm, SE
  • Paris, FR
  • Milan, IT (in Italian language)

The course has been designed to provide a full coverage of PowerPivot modeling options and a solid explanation of DAX concepts (syntax, aggregations, evaluation contexts, date intelligence, and much else). The content is based on our PowerPivot book and we use several practical examples and graphical diagrams to explain the concepts.

The targets of these training days are both Excel Power Users and BI Consultants / BI Developer. We had many BI consultants in our first workshop, in part because we reach a more technical audience, but also because PowerPivot is an excellent way to create proof of concepts and/or to face particular problems that don’t require (or don’t justify) the building of a “traditional” Corporate BI solution. If you are reading this blog regularly and you still don’t know PowerPivot, you should consider attending the workshop or at least read the book! The reason is simple: you cannot avoid learning DAX. The next version of Analysis Services will use DAX for the new BI Semantic Model. And, after more than one year of DAX usage, I have to say that it is really powerful, even if it require some changes in your mindset, especially if you are used to MDX. It is not that one is better than the other. They are different. Being able to use both on Analysis Services will be wonderful.

The course outline is the following:

  • Introduction to PowerPivot
  • Introduction to DAX
  • Data Modeling basics for building PowerPivot data models
  • Data loading techniques with different kind of sources: OLTP, DWH, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access and others
  • Mastering Pivot Tables
  • Full coverage of the DAX programming language, with several hands-on examples
    • Evaluation Contexts and CALCULATE
    • Calendar-based computations
    • DAX Patterns
  • Advanced data modeling techniques to solve some common scenarios
  • SharePoint integration

All the details and the registration form are available on here.

CALCULATE
Context transition

Evaluates an expression in a context modified by filters.

CALCULATE ( <Expression> [, <Filter> [, <Filter> [, … ] ] ] )