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PowerPivotGeek’s Tips, How-to, and A Peek Inside!

Published May 19, 2010 Internals , Perspectives , Usage 2 Comments
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PowerPivotGeek has been doing a lot of GREAT posts the last week and its getting harder and harder to keep up with greatness!  Saying this, here are some great tips, how-to, and A Peek Inside!

Tips!

 

How-To

 

A Peek Inside!

Enjoy!

Customizing the PowerPivot Management Dashboard

Published May 10, 2010 Configuration , Internals Leave a Comment
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(preliminary pre-release)

Copyright © 2010, Microsoft Corporation, All rights reserved.
Primary Author: Ankur Goyal, SQL-Analysis Services
Technical Reviewer: John Hancock, Dave Wickert, Lee Graber, and Artur Pop

Abstract

The purpose of PowerPivot for SharePoint is to allow users to share their PowerPivot workbooks in a secure and scalable environment. This whitepaper focuses on the features that SQL Server 2008 R2 provides to help IT users to manage and understand the self-service BI activity. This whitepaper also describes key features of the PowerPivot Management Dashboard that we provide with PowerPivot for SharePoint. The PowerPivot Management Dashboard is built using PowerPivot, SharePoint web part pages and Excel Services technologies. This white paper describes how IT users can extend the capabilities of the management dashboard by creating their own custom reports and dashboard.

To read this great whitepaper, please click here.

PowerPivot Technical Diagram: PowerPivot Client/Server Architecture

Published April 28, 2010 Internals , Perspectives Leave a Comment
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Because PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint involve many components from SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010, this poster contains all of the key components that make up PowerPivot in one view. This view includes nearly all of the logical architecture components and illustrates how these componets work together.

Included in this diagram are the components for:

  • PowerPivot for Excel
  • PowerPivot for SharePoint
  • Browser-Based Clients and their connection to PowerPivot
  • Data Import and Data Providers in relation to PowerPivot
  • Analysis Services Clients and their ability to connect to PowerPivot
  • Timer Jobs, Health and Usage Data Collection in relation to PowerPivot

For more information, please go to the reference sqlcat.com site: PowerPivot Technical Diagram: PowerPivot Client/Server Architecture

Working with the 2010 Office ACE provider

Published April 2, 2010 Internals Leave a Comment
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By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on April 2nd, 2010

Ok. I’ve promised some best practices – here is my first one.

What is the 2010 Office ACE provider and why is this important to PowerPivot? The 2010 Office System Driver for Data Connectivity Components (aka the Office ACE provider) is a OLE DB provider that can be used to read data from and write data to Office 2010 system files such as Microsoft Access Beta (mdb and accdb) files and Microsoft Excel 2010 (xls, xlsx, and xlsb) files. You can also use it to access text files. The provider “Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.14.0” which includes both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, is available for download here: ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C06B8369-60DD-4B64-A44B-84B371EDE16D&displaylang=en ). PowerPivot uses the ACE provider as part of a data refresh job to import data.

Read more…

Collation, Localization and Globalization, oh my!

Published March 24, 2010 Internals Leave a Comment
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By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@hotmail.com), on March 24th, 2010

From time to time we get questions about these three topics. Let’s take them one at a time and see how PowerPivot works under the covers. PowerPivot works on all types of collations, languages and regional settings.

(if you like this kind of ‘internationalization stuff’, read on)

Read more…

A Peek Inside: Unloading PowerPivot data

Published March 4, 2010 Internals Leave a Comment
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By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on March 4th, 2010

Ok folks. Here comes a cool one.

As I am sure that everyone is aware by now, one of the most powerful new features of PowerPivot is that we do on-demand loading of embedded data. Well, if you are going to load it, then you had better at least think about unload it at some time. There is probably some law of thermodynamics that applies here.

First rule for deleting data is that we don’t touch data if there are users currently connected to it. But other than that, any databases loaded or cached by the PSS (i.e. their database folder is contained in the SSAS Backup folder tree) are candidates for being unloaded.

There are two ways that databases can be unloaded in PowerPivot:

Read more…

Cannot add the specified assembly to the global assembly cache

Published February 14, 2010 Internals , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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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:

Read more…

The data connection uses Windows Authentication and user credentials could not be delegated

Published February 14, 2010 Internals Leave a Comment
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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.

Read more…

Dashboard Bubble Chart Shows a Red X (fails to load)

Published February 14, 2010 Internals Leave a Comment
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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:

Read more…

A connection corresponding to the embedded PowerPivot data was not found in the Excel workbook

Published February 14, 2010 Internals Leave a Comment
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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.

Read more…

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