This free webinar, organised by the UK Data Service, will demonstrate how Power Pivot can be used to accomplish both of these tasks. At the same time in Excel proper we will show how the new dynamic array functions can also be used to simplify Excel tasks.

When Excel changed to allow worksheets to have 1M rows, everyone thought ‘great’ won’t run out of space now! Then big data came along and even the 1M barrier became a potential problem again. However, for several years now many versions of Excel have included ‘Power Pivot’. Although integrated into Excel, it is a distinct processing system with its own set of commands for processing data. Yes, these have to be mastered but the benefits include being able to load datasets with millions of rows and being able to join datasets together in a more intuitive way.

About the webinar series: getting data, storing data, manipulating data

All projects need data. You can generate it yourself via surveys or you can get some from the UK Data Service. If you didn’t generate it yourself, the chances are it is not quite what you wanted but you can adapt it to your needs. You can adapt the data by a variety of means; cleaning the data, extracting parts of the data (and ignoring the rest) and, trickiest of all, joining data from different sources.

This series of three webinars will cover ways of dealing with these data issues using both familiar software tools such as Excel and others that you may be aware of but may not have had any direct experience of.

In the first webinar we will look at SQL and Databases: useful for storing large data (100’s of GB or even more) and using simple SQL queries to retrieve only the items you want, possibly across more than one dataset.

In the second webinar we will look at various means of getting data from the Internet: this might range from simple copy and paste through to systematic data downloads from datasets or scraping specific items from 100’s of similar web pages.

The third webinar will look at the new functionality available in the later versions of Excel: Power Pivot to break the 1M rows problem and making dataset joins much easier, and the latest dynamic array functions which can simplify many common tasks.