PowerPivot has a very cool feature that allows you to publish your data to PowerPivot Galleries within SharePoint. This allows users to access and report off the data that you build within Excel, but do it all through the Web. In order to enable this feature, you first need to create a PowerPivot Gallery in SharePoint.
NOTE: This is part of the Using PowerPivot to Analyze Your Dynamics AX Data blog series where we show how PowerPivot can assist you with advanced data analysis and reporting, making those extracts from Dynamics AX to Excel even more valuable. If you want to see all of the other posts in this series, click here.
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There are a number of different types of columns types that you can define within the PowerPivot manager, which act differently based depending on where they are used. One example are the Image column types. If you have a column that links to an image file then you can use it within your dashboards to spice things up a little.
Just as you can do within Excel, you can also use any of the built in functions within the Data Model designer. This allows you to perform string and date manipulation as you create new column definitions, giving you more reporting options than are available within the default tables.
PowerPivot has another great feature that allows you to create relationships between tables so that you can report off both tables within the same query.
Where PowerPivot starts to really outshine the simple Pivot Tables is in the feature that allows you to create new columns through the PowerPivot Manager. You can then filter, and report off the results as if it were a normal field in the system.
PowerPivot has a couple of extra features that you can take advantage of while you are building your dashboards for slicing and filtering your data. One is called a Timeline Slicer.
PowerPivot gives you all of the capabilities that the Pivot Tables have, plus more. With PowerPivot you can create pivot tables and charts, and also dashboards with multiple panels showing that use the same data source.