PowerPivot Twins! » FAQ

How much data can I load into PowerPivot?

dennyglee — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:56:59 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on August 22nd, 2010

Recently a question has come up on one of the forums about the number of rows that PowerPivot can load. Clearly PowerPivot can hold a lot – just look at our demos. Millions and millions . . ah . . but how many millions?

The key geek ‘magic’ is the Vertipaq engine. The in-memory Vertipaq engine has an extensive array of techniques that it uses for compressing and manipulating the data. Being an in-memory database system means that the more data that we can get in . . the more data we can scan . . the more kinds of applications that we can solve. So compression is a HUGE deal for us.

Please click through to continue reading: How much data can I load into PowerPivot?

Filed under: Configuration, Internals Tagged: Database, FAQ, SharePoint

Working with the 2010 Office ACE provider

dennyglee — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:13:29 +0000

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

Click through to continue reading Working with the 2010 Office ACE provider

Filed under: Configuration, Internals Tagged: ACE, FAQ, SharePoint

Client: What happens if I install the wrong ‘bitness’?

dennyglee — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:44:11 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on June 17th, 2010

Recently ran into this situation: Customer installed the wrong PowerPivot bits on their machine. They were running on a 64-bit OS with Office 2010 x64, but installed PowerPivot for Excel 32-bit. Everything installed OK, but when they clicked on the PowerPivot tab in Excel; then the PowerPivot Window they received the following error:

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Filed under: Configuration, Installation Tagged: Configuration, Excel, FAQ, Troubleshooting

Modifying the SharePoint v4.master page for the PowerPivot Gallery

dennyglee — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:41:03 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@hotmail.com), on June 17th, 2010

Attempting to use a modified version of the SharePoint v4.master page is a great way to style our SharePoint site. If you interested in doing this, then the first thing to do is to make sure that you go to the right place:

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Filed under: Configuration Tagged: Configuration, FAQ

Delegation, Claims, Active Directory….Again?! Frak!

dennyglee — Sun, 23 May 2010 15:51:19 +0000

May 23, 2010 by dennyglee | Edit

As you may have noted in my original posting Delegation, Claims, Active Directory…Oh My!…Aw Crap!, it quickly described how to solve issues surrounding the delegation of the claims token within an Active Directory environment. In it I referenced Lee Graber’s excellent posting: The data connection uses Windows Authentication and user credentials could not be delegated.

Click through to continue reading

Filed under: Configuration, Installation Tagged: Configuration, FAQ, SharePoint, Troubleshooting

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

Uninstalling PowerPivot for Excel

dennyglee — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:15:53 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on February 24th, 2010

A trick for the client-side folks doing build-to-build reinstallations (or if you wish to clear all of the PowerPivot code from your client): besides uninstalling “Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel” (via control panel Add/Remove/Uninstall Programs, the exact wording varies depending on the OS you are running), you may also have to delete files in:

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?