Analyzing Power Pivot Models with Tableau

Now that Tableau has been highly praised by Gartner, you might be looking for ways to make the best of both self-service BI tools: the great data modelling capabilities and programming richness of Power Pivot and the visualization strengths of Tableau. Interestingly, besides published to SharePoint Power Pivot workbooks, Tableau can connect to local Power Pivot models and send MDX queries (as it does when connected to Multidimensional and Tabular).

This works thanks to the Tableau PowerPivot Connector wrapper (Microsoft SQL Server 2012 PowerPivot for Excel) that you can install from the Tableau website. Read this document to decide which one to use.