For your PowerPivot Best Practices, Lessons Learned, and random thoughts!
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on December 21st, 2009
While this is technically a pure SharePoint posting, we have found it useful in our labs. We have password resets all of the time and this cheat sheet was developed to make it as painless as possible. I hope you find it as useful as we do.
For those of you whom had missed Dave Wickert and my presentation at PASS 2009 (SQLCAT: A Preview to PowerPivot Server Best Practices), we invite you to register for PowerPivot for SharePoint Academy Live which will occur on 12/15 8am PST at: https://swrt.worktankseattle.com/webcast/3475/preview.aspx
Thanks!
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on December 11th, 2009
I am inspired by a recent post from a colleague about the various issues that can come up with Excel Services delegation (see a Denny Lee’s blog here: http://dennyglee.com/2009/11/18/troubleshooting-powerpivot-excel-services-connectivity/) and I wanted to take it a bit further (and maybe a bit ‘geekie’-er)
First, why is this a problem? After all, as you can see in Denny’s post, you can see the workbook and you even have a thumbnail for it in the Gallery. What’s up here? The core of the problem is that unless you’ve set the connection to refresh when you first open the workbook, Excel Services uses its pivot cache to construct the pivot table and slicers. It is only if you manually refresh the connection, or click on a slicer, that you make an actual connection to the embedded data. Until then you are just looking at cached information. Until you click on a slicer, you don’t really know if Excel Services is working – so a strong recommendation that I make to any person doing a validating their installation is to “ALWAYS CLICK ON A SLICER” if you want to make sure that your installation is working properly.
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on December 11th, 2009
Suppose your thumbnail has gotten out of whack with your workbook. How do you regenerate it? Sure, the brute force way is to re-upload the file again, but surely there must be a geek’er way to do this. Fortunately there is: just edit one of the SharePoint properties for the file. I always select the “Title”. I delete the last character in the title of the file and then re-enter it. Click Save. Since this document property has to be back populated into the file, by changing a property forces the event handler to fire and the thumbnail is regenerated. There ya go!
Original source is http://powerpivotgeek.com/2009/12/11/a-trick-how-do-i-regenerate-a-thumbnail-in-the-gallery/
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on December 2nd, 2009
From time to time I hear questions and comments from folks questioning why they should purchase the server-side component for PowerPivot. After all, the client software is free (with a Office 2010 Professional license). Why spend the money to invest in the server pieces . . . And because it requires a SQL Server Enterprise Edition license, it can get costly.
Having spent 3+ years of my life developing this product, naturally I have a fair amount of passion around this topic. The following is my own personal reasons; my own personal goals for the software and why I believe PowerPivot is such a pivotal (pun intended) component in a company’s BI strategy. This is not marketing and I apologize up front for it. So here goes:
What is the value-add for PowerPivot for SharePoint?
