PowerPivot Twins! » Data Refresh

Keeping a workbook ‘pinned’ in memory

dennyglee — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:16:20 +0000

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:

Filed under: Configuration, Demo Tagged: Connectivity, Data Refresh

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

dennyglee — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 05:00:42 +0000

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.

Filed under: Internals Tagged: Data Refresh, Troubleshooting

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 to manually update your PowerPivot Management Dashboard

dennyglee — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:28:09 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on January 18th, 2010

We have gotten lots of feedback about the new CTP3 PowerPivot Management Dashboard feature. Most folks are excited about the new reports and can see how the reports give you an unparalleled ability to ‘peek’ inside the running services. However the default “wait-a-day” update cycle can see a bit long. A day-long cycle period seems OK for long-term analysis of data, but for demoing the system and investigating how to use the capabilities work you might want a shorter cycle, or want the ability to refresh the data during the day. This post is all about how you do that.

First, you have to determine if the Usage file collection is long enough for you to wait. By default, it takes 30 minutes for your actual usage of the system (clicking here; clicking there) actually end up in a Usage file. If you can wait 30 minutes, then leave the system as it is. If you need usage information sooner, then you will need to tweak two settings:

Posted in Configuration Tagged: Data Refresh, Management Dashboard

Troubleshooting #PowerPivot Excel Services connectivity

dennyglee — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:07:58 +0000

You’re on your way to PowerPivot for SharePoint functionality – you’ve uploaded your PowerPivot for Excel workbook to your SharePoint PowerPivot Gallery. You view the thumbnails of your report and they look nice.

From the thumbnail, you click on the report you want to see, and the report renders nicely.

But then you click on a slicer, and then all of a sudden you get an error like the one below.

What can you do?

Posted in Installation, Internals Tagged: Connectivity, Data Refresh, Excel Services, SharePoint, Troubleshooting

Steps taken during a #PowerPivot data refresh

dennyglee — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:35:27 +0000

In this posting we will take a more detailed technical look at how the data refresh facility works and the steps that it takes to accomplish a data refresh cycle. Rather than starting with the “Manage data refresh” page, we will assume that you know how to setup a schedule – in this posting, we will take a deep dive into the cycle itself.

What steps are taken when the data is refreshed?

Now that you have configured your schedule(s) for the workbook, let’s take a step back and examine more closely what data refresh actually means. I think that it is valuable to understand, at some basic level, exactly what the system is going to do on your behalf at 2am in the morning. When a job actually run, the data refresh facility goes through the following steps:

Posted in Internals Tagged: Data Refresh, SharePoint