Book Review: Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning

I'm loving my Kindle. I seem to be getting through books so much faster. One book that I recently read was Book Review: Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning by Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari.

I really liked this book. It provided quite good coverage of PowerPivot use in Excel 2010 and also spent some time mapping the use of PowerPivot to organizational requirements. Marco and Alberto provided more coverage of DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) than I have seen anywhere else, particularly in relation to the CALCULATE verb.

If I have any criticism of the book, it's probably just the order of the chapters. I can imagine that many people won't want to delve so deeply into DAX and may stop reading before they get to the later chapters. I'd like to have seen much of the DAX material at the back of the book as a type of "advanced DAX topics" section, given that the remainder of the book doesn't really depend upon it.

I was left feeling that there's a need for another type of DAX book, much like the book that Art Tennick wrote for MDX: Practical MDX Queries: For Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2008. In that book, Art provides a large number of "recipes" for how to achieve common tasks with MDX. I'm sure that's also needed for DAX.

Anyway, Marco & Alberto's book is definitely recommended.I'd give it 8 out of 10. (And a big thumbs up to the publisher for making a Kindle version available too).