Power Query + Power Pivot + DAX = fast and powerful

I inherited a monthly Update that is mostly the same data updated and then some analysis. I paste the raw data from 9 different places, manually aligning them as a single table. There are a load of pivots that have calculated fields and items and updating them take a morning and most of that was just waiting for the calculated items in the pivots to refresh.

While I was waiting for that to refresh, I decided to see if I could recreate the same pivots in a new sheet, using powerquery. In the time it took for my original sheet to refresh, I loaded the data into powerquery, aligned the data, loaded everything into the model, created custom lists for the columns to look up off to allow for differences in the names between data sources, created extra lookups to improve the filtering, created the relationships, created DAX functions to replace the in-pivot calculated items and fields and recreated the tables and charts I use every month.

The original refresh finshed about 5 minutes after I did all that. I did a test refresh and what took a morning now takes about 3 minutes on my new sheet.

I'm a fairly recent convert to PQE, but this little project is the first time I've really dug into Power Pivot. It could be a game changer for a lot of my work. There's stuff I was doing in PQE that is a lot easier to do in PowerPivot. Being able to link lookup tables, data tables and facts together is really fun.