Power Pivot, formerly known as PowerPivot (without spacing), is a self-service business intelligence feature of Microsoft Excel which facilitates the creation of a tabular model to import, relate, and analyze data from a variety of sources.
[1] Prior to the release of Power Pivot, the engine for Microsoft's Business Intelligence suite was exclusively contained within SQL Server Analysis Services.
In 2006, an initiative was launched by Amir Netz of the SQL Server Reporting Services team at Microsoft, codenamed Project Gemini, with the goal of making the analytical features of SSAS available within Excel.
In the Power Pivot editor, relationships can be established between multiple tables to effectively create foreign key joins.
[9] Power Pivot allows for importing data from multiple sources, such as databases (SQL Server, Microsoft Access, etc.
DAX expressions allow a user to create calculated columns and measures to summarize and aggregate large quantities of data.