PowerPivot Twins! » DAX

Cube Formulas and NamedSets Running Commentary

dennyglee — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:57:21 +0000

For those of you who want to know the timeline of the commentary by @PowerPivotPro and @dennylee on cube formulas and named sets. Rob started the process with his excellent introductions:

Then @dennylee innocently created a three-part posting on how to create filtered by Top 10 reports:

which was quickly responded to and openly challenged by @PowerPivotPro

Solid punches were given and mayhem ensued, but @dennylee got his footing back and wreaked havoc via pile driver!

Pivots, Cube Formulas, Named Sets … Oh my!

Perhaps more mayhem will ensue – perhaps not. And in fact – it did with a great entry from Rob:

PowerPivot Data in Scatter Charts, etc.

So the feud is over…we think! Either way, you have to admit its sort of dorky, eh?!

Filed under: Perspectives Tagged: DAX, Excel, MDX

Create a #PowerPivot report filtered by the Top X Users by (Part 3 of 3)

dennyglee — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:08:48 +0000

This blog posting is a continuation of previous post, Create a #PowerPivot report filtered by the Top X Users by (Part 1 of 3), where I had created an Excel Named Set based on the Top 10 Users by Events as noted in Figure 1. What is handy about using named sets is that it will only render the top 10 rows as opposed to the millions of rows of users this data set has. While it is easy to show the Top 10 users, it is not straightforward to filter by those Top 10 users because Excel Named Sets cannot be used as a filter. Example reports with this type of business logic include “most common hospital departmental systems that the top 10 users are accessing” or “what are the most watched TV programs of the top 10 markets (i.e. cities)”.

Figure 1: Top 10 Users by Events using an Excel Named Set

In the second blog posting of this series, Create a #PowerPivot report filtered by the Top X Users by (Part 2 of 3), I showed how to filter by this same named set in a static fashion. In this third part of this blog series, let’s figure out how to filter by a named set in a dynamic fashion.

Create a #PowerPivot report filtered by the Top X Users by (Part 2 of 3)

dennyglee — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:19:38 +0000

Figure 1: Top 10 Users by Events using an Excel Named Set

While it is easy to show the Top 10 users, it is not straightforward to filter by those Top 10 users because Excel Named Sets cannot be used as a filter. Example reports with this type of business logic include “most common hospital departmental systems that the top 10 users are accessing” or “what are the most watched TV programs of the top 10 markets (i.e. cities)”.

Create a #PowerPivot report filtered by the Top X Users by (Part 1 of 3)

dennyglee — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:52:20 +0000

January 27, 2010 by dennyglee

I was recently working with a customer to help them solve an interesting PowerPivot problem where they had wanted to get the Top 10 users within their data set and create reports based on that. One approach is to create a rank function within PowerPivot as noted in a Rank function thread on the SQL Server 2008 R2 PowerPivot for Excel forum? Another way is to create a Pivot Table where the UserID was placed in the [rows] and the measure in question in the [data] area; and sort the data from largest to smallest.