Excel career: macros or power-pivot?

Hello,

I am new to this forum, and need some help to decide which way I should expand my excel-skills. I use excel for a lot of reporting. Should I take a course in macros or power pivot? BR Gry

In an ideal world, you would use the power of Pivot and BI using a VBA code. This would kill two birds with a stone.

If you import data from a database for reporting, I would have though that SQL would be infinitely more useful than either VBA or Power Pivot. I've never really got power pivot, it's just like a really slow and irritating pivot table - but then I'm happy summarising data in SQL

Kyle123,
SQL requires learning a new language( If SQL is a language), but you can get away with Power Pivot with in a day.

I reckon you could get away with SQL in a day, at least for the basics - it's pretty simple and it's hardly a language (unlike VBA).

SQL is a doddle, it's only difficult because it requires a different way of thinking - it's more head scratching than learning

Though it would require some understanding of relational databases, but then so would Power Pivot

Kyle 123,

I bought a book called learning VBA in 21 days. I do not know what the author has in mind when he wrote the book. I have passed my 210 days and still have not finish it yet. I would take your positive encouragement to learn with in a day and might take the dive-in, but I may struggle to float-out for breathing.

lol sql is far more simple than VBA, it's a straightforward way of updating and reading from tables in a textual manner. You should get the basics here: http://www.w3schools.com/sql/, don't get bogged down in any of the creating tables, adding indexes etc in sql - this isn't done very often and is often done in the GUI. All beginners really need to know is how to extract data, so anything that starts with a SELECT key word.

I talked one of the finance guys through it at work and within an hour he could write basic queries and start pulling data if that's any encouragement!!