For your PowerPivot Best Practices, Lessons Learned, and random thoughts!
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on March 2nd, 2010
One of the special considerations that arise when demonstrating PowerPivot is that you would like to ensure the workbooks that you are showing are kept in memory all of the time. PowerPivot does not have a built-in ‘pin’ feature to do this, but there is nice trick that you can use. Here is what I do:
By Denny Lee, Ed Campbell
So what is RBS and why would I want to use it in order to help my PowerPivot for SharePoint farm? Well, RBS in this particular case is Remote Blob Store which was introduced as part of one of the SQL Server 2008 Feature Packs. As of this post, the current version can be found in the SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP Feature Pack (search SQL Server 2008 R2 Remote Blob Store). Simply put, remote blob store allows you to put blobs outside of the SQL Server database so you can reduce the performance and manageability impact of storing blobs directly within the database. For more information about RBS, please refer to the documentation linked below.
Ankur Goyal from the Analysis Services Test team has written a great diagnostic guide on how to use the PowerPivot Management Dashboard. For more information, please refer to:
Enjoy!
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on February 24th, 2010
A trick for the client-side folks doing build-to-build reinstallations (or if you wish to clear all of the PowerPivot code from your client): besides uninstalling “Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel” (via control panel Add/Remove/Uninstall Programs, the exact wording varies depending on the OS you are running), you may also have to delete files in:
For those of you who are using Windows 7 client, you should be good-to-go already because you already have Desktop Experience installed. But if you are using a Windows Server OS (e.g. Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2), you will need to install it as part of an additional feature via the Server Manager.
Why you ask?
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on February 15th, 2010
Recently there have been some discussions on the forums and in other areas concerning how PowerPivot handles nulls. As this has changed between CTP3 (back in November) and the upcoming RTM of the product, I thought that it would be a good posting. Here is the situation: suppose you have a simple calculated measure:
By Lee Graber (leegr@microsoft.com), on February 12th, 2010
This is part of my continuing series on debugging SharePoint and PowerPivot. In this case, I do not expect any PowerPivot users to ever encounter this error in the context of PowerPivot. However, the general SharePoint developer who is in the early stages of building and testing his custom solutions might hit this and since so many people on our team have been confused by it, I thought I would throw out some help for other developers. This error is hit when trying to deploy a SharePoint solution package to the farm. It could be an ApplicationServer solution or a WebFrontEnd solution, the important part is that it has an assembly marked to be deployed to the GAC:
By Lee Graber (leegr@microsoft.com), on February 8th, 2010
This is one of the two main errors that users could see from Excel Services when using PowerPivot. This is encountered when refreshing PowerPivot data connections or performing an action which requires re-querying the PowerPivot database, such as clicking on a slicer or expanding a node in a pivot table. To debug, some level of understanding of what Excel Services is doing is required. For this, I recommend reading an earlier post on this blog by Dave … http://powerpivotgeek.com/2009/12/11/excel-services-delegation/. In general, this is an add-on to Dave’s post which is a quick summary of how to debug this error.
By Lee Graber (leegr@microsoft.com), on February 8th, 2010
If there is any error trying to load the bubble chart data for the dashboard, instead of getting a page load failure, the bubble chart simply displays a red X. Whenever you get a red X in the bubble chart there will be an associated log entry in the ULS log on the machine running the Central Admin site. It will look something like this:
By Lee Graber (leegr@microsoft.com), on February 7th, 2010
This error is another in a series of common errors that users can hit during seemingly normal scenarios that might be a little bit difficult to interpret at first. We actually did work to try and make the error descriptive, but to the new user, it may still be cryptic. This error occurs when you chose the “Manage PowerPivot Data Refresh” option of an xlsx file which does not contain any embedded PowerPivot data.
