An example of using the above feature is importing data from Microsoft Word. Let’s say you have a Word document containing the following table:
The scenario here is to import the data from Word and perform a simple analysis.
The first step is to select the entire table and copy its contents to the clipboard.
Then you have to launch Excel 2010 and open the PowerPivot window:
Click on “To New Table” and you will be presented with a Paste Preview dialog in which you will be able to see the contents of the clipboard and how they are “translated” by the PowerPivot engine:
At the bottom of the dialog you can choose to use the first row as column names and that’s what I did in this example.
You then click on “OK” and you are presented with the data as imported into PowerPivot:
Next, by clicking on the “PivotTable” button you are presented with various options regarding what type(s) of pivot tables you can create:
For this example I chose to use a “Single PivotChart”.
Then, the PowerPivot dialog closes and the Excel worksheet is presented containing the pivot table:
You can then easily perform aggregations using the tools provided by PowerPivot:
Another post on copy-paste and PowerPivot is coming where we will see how we can copy-paste two tables from Word and build relationships on the data.