PowerPivot Twins! » Usage

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

dennyglee — Wed, 19 May 2010 05:55:38 +0000

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!

While PowerPivot for SharePoint requires 64-bit, remember that You must use a 32-bit browser when running on a 64-bit client – click to read why!
You may see SharePoint Timer Service error even in RTM, click the link to see what you can (or not bother) doing!
Are you Interested in PowerPivot and data mining? – here’s some great stuff!
A great one is Enabling the SharePoint Developer Dashboard which allows you to monitor page load performance on SharePoint.

How-To

How to resolve the issue when PowerPivot for Excel add-in is not coming up in Excel
For those who like to control your formatting of your workbooks, how to Hide a table in the PowerPivot field list.

A Peek Inside!

Get your “geek on” on Updating data in your embedded PowerPivot workbook.
Yay! We fixed for RTM the “Unsupported features” in CTP3 workbooks error.

Enjoy!

Filed under: Internals, Perspectives, Usage Tagged: Excel, FAQ, SharePoint

Hierarchies, Oh Hierarchies…where are thou? (in PowerPivot)

dennyglee — Wed, 12 May 2010 05:56:14 +0000

I had a great question from a customer concerning something weird happening with PowerPivot relationships. In this example, we have two tables such as city and state. With the City-State mapping table, it is apparent that the cities of Boston, Quincy, Norwood belong to MA while Seattle and Redmond belong to WA. Even though the relationship makes sense (as per below)

the output doesn’t!

To continue reading, click here.

Filed under: Usage Tagged: FAQ

Now that PowerPivot has RTM…

dennyglee — Wed, 12 May 2010 05:23:55 +0000

As per many blog postings, press releases, tweets, messages, and streams – PowerPivot went RTM on the 5/12. So what can or should we do now? Here’s some quick great blog postings to get yourself up and running on PowerPivot ASAP:

PowerPivotGeek notes that PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is now available as a download as well as some great Launch Day testimonials for PowerPivot.
Now that SQL Server 2008 R2 has RTM’ed…check out this blog post on more testimonials and case studies of PowerPivot
As noted on the official SQL Server blog, How can I prepare for PowerPivot?
And for the brave, don’t forget to download the PowerPivot Technical Diagram: PowerPivot Client/Server Architecture

Enjoy!!

Filed under: Configuration, Perspectives, Usage Tagged: FAQ

PowerPivot and data feeds . . .

dennyglee — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:45:53 +0000

Great video by John Hancock on PowerPivot and data feeds

PowerPivot and data feeds . . ..

Filed under: Usage Tagged: Connectivity

Howto: Get more flexibility when importing data from text files

dennyglee — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:41:21 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on April 27th, 2010

Question: By default PowerPivot has two limitations when working with text files (using the Office ACE OLE DB provider): (1) will only import data from files with an extension of .txt, .tab, and .csv; and (2) it will only recognize tab, comma, semicolon, space, colon, and vertical bar and column delimiters. Is there a way to change PowerPivot’s configuration so that it will recognize other file extensions or column delimiters?

Querying data within the PowerPivot Excel client add-in

dennyglee — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:37:44 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@hotmail.com), on April 27th, 2010

Recently we have been seeing some users complain about how the PowerPivot Excel client add-in deals with queries. There are three limitations that you need deal with when working with SQL (TSQL, PL/SQL, or whatever) and stored procedures:

Continue reading Querying data within the PowerPivot Excel client add-in

Filed under: Usage Tagged: Connectivity, Excel

PowerPivot for SharePoint Quick tip: Don’t forget to install Desktop Experience

dennyglee — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:50:48 +0000

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?

PowerPivot Data Refresh SSRS Report

dennyglee — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 06:35:05 +0000

January 19, 2010 by dennyglee

As many of you already know, in order to figure out which workbooks had succeeded or failed execute in their data refresh, you need only to go the PowerPivot Management Dashboard (Central Administration > General Application Settings > PowerPivot Management Dashboard) in order to see the status of your data refresh as noted in the figure below.

How do I get the menu options for individual reports within the #PowerPivot Gallery?

dennyglee — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:43:52 +0000

January 15, 2010 by dennyglee

When you start playing with the PowerPivot Gallery, some of you will be enamored by the various views of the Silverlight control included as part of the PowerPivot Gallery – I know I was!