One of the major subjects that are talked about in the US is finance. One of those topics is the US debt. I got a mail today that someone published a book about the subject:
http://www.understandingtheusdebt.com/
So you think why do I blog about it ? Well he did all his research using PowerPivot (and you can actually download the workbook on the site )!.
A quote from his site:
The information presented in this book comes from public sources. Where possible, the data was pulled directly from the government agency (e.g., the Bureau of Public Debt, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, etc.) responsible for collecting and producing a given data set. The charts and tables were created in Excel 2010. I used a new Excel add-in, called PowerPivot (www.powerpivot.com), to
- gather and store data from multiple sources
- create relationships among different data sets
- define custom calculations (e.g., last non-empty, yearly changes, etc.)
- analyze the data using Excel PivotTables and PivotCharts
An Excel workbook, which contains much of the data I present in this book, is available below. If you want to dive further into a particular subject area, you’ll need to a copy of Office 2010 Professional (the PowerPivot add-in is free). I plan to post a brief tutorial for those who want to get more familiar with the data modeling and analysis techniques used in the workbook. In the meantime, take a look at my August 2010 Article in SQL Server Magazine to learn more about PowerPivot (see the author page for a link).
Check out the entire page and the download link here: http://www.understandingtheusdebt.com/technology.aspx
Great example of a self sevice BI 🙂
That’s not just someone. Tyler Chessman of Microsoft created that work.
Ah pretty cool, I didn’t know that 🙂 I’ll send him an internal mail.