Want to try out PowerPivot for Excel 2010 yourself, but don’t have time or resources to build a demo system? Now you can get 2 hours in a virtual lab (Powered by Hyper-V) to get to grips with it:

Click here to connect to the Lab (IE Only since it needs ActiveX):

https://cmg.vlabcenter.com/default.aspx?moduleid=ad3bd3e9-8d2b-498d-94fa-e41e1b09730d

It’s not too slow considering the number of people which must be assaulting the servers right now :)

Ignore the CPU in the above screenshot, the important things to note are the nearly 4 million rows loaded into memory on a box with 4GB of RAM, and the VertiPaq engine is not pushing very much memory at all.

Adding a calculated column (note the 4 million row count), and the Intellisense in the Formula bar.

The Calculated Column (Profit) was applied against all 4million rows and the screen refreshed. Shown also the contents of the PivotTable drop down.

The Pivot chart and table with Horizontal and Vertical slicers shown (lab steps on the far right).

Note that there’s some weirdness in this lab as you follow it through which doesn’t quite match up to the intended results in the lab screenshots (i.e. selecting the GeographyKey as the slicer will give you the ids, not the Country names as depicted in the screenshots), but it gives you an excellent grounding in the basics of getting data into Excel through PowerPivot and applying the slicers and working with the chart and PivotTable (PowerPivotTable?) controls.

Give the Virtual Lab a try today and see PowerPivot in action for yourself!

Hat tip to the PowerPivotGeek for this one.