Power Pivot Crashes? - An Update - Excelerator BI

Power Pivot Crashes? – An Update

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Today Avi Singh and I met with Howie Dickerman from Microsoft to discuss the Power Pivot for Excel Add-In.  You can read the background to this meeting at my blog post last month.  Howie is the Program Manager assigned to Power Pivot for Excel and has a wealth of experience with Excel and other products.  I shared all the comments that people added to my blog post from 19th October.  The great news is Howie is already crystal clear about the problems.  We had a great discussion about the plans that Microsoft has for improving stability and performance for the Addin.  And there definitely is a plan.  Like any software project it is impossible to say when we will see something, but I am just excited that there is a plan.

How You Can Help

Microsoft already has a clear understanding of the areas that need some work.  What Microsoft needs more than anything is a set of structured steps that will reproduce an issue – any issue you have.  From experience this is very hard to pin down.  If you know how to reproduce an issue, please send me the steps to reproduce it (you can add to the comments below or send me a message via my home page).

Note:  I realise lots of people have had a bad experience at times.  I am explicitly looking for “reproducible steps” here.  This means that when you follow these steps it will always (or often – eg 1 in 4) cause the issue.  If it is not reproducible then the information cannot help for this next phase.

Relevant Articles

This is the second post in a series of articles.  You can read the others in this series from the following links.

Part 1 and Part 3

12 thoughts on “Power Pivot Crashes? – An Update”

  1. I experience PowerPivot crashing in Excel 2016 whenever I go to edit a measure and click “check formula.” It will crash every single time I do that. I also experience it crash when I edit the measure name and it does not change the name in the field list. If I then try to change the name in the field list, it crashes.

    The only solution I have found to my first issue is to create a new measure every time I need to make a change to a measure. This is incredibly tedious and becoming a bigger issue as I have measures referencing other measures. Please share if you have found a solution to my problem.

    1. This is not normal and there is still no fix. In your case I suggest you write your measures in the Power Pivot window down the bottom of the tables. This is a lot more stable.

      1. I’m a [very] long time user of PowerPivot and have always used the ‘bottom area’ to write my measures – if I cause an error when creating the measure (a typo or something), i can’t edit it or delete it afterwards and PowerPivot just hangs when i try to do so. Have to go back to Excel, remove the table via PowerQuery and start again. This never used to be the case – puzzled as to what is going on now (I’m using Excel 2013 with the latest plug-in versions).

  2. Click “Update all” in the Excel power pivot ribbon, then click on Microsoft Outlook. The update process in Excel hangs and the only way out is through task manager End Process.

  3. Created a Date/Calendar table mainly in PowerPivot using 11 calculated fields (plus 1 original date field pulled from a worksheet table). Now can’t switch to Diagram View to view/create relationships – each time I try it crashes Excel. Diagram View was no problem with the 9 other tables already in the Data Model, which were created in Power Query.

  4. Hi Matt,

    I’m a newcomer to PowerPivot and have recently purchased Rob and Avi’s book.
    While practicing adding / editing the Measures (chapter 6), and trying to edit the measure “Profit Pct” (page40), Excel crashes (repeatedly).
    This is while trying to multiply the Profit Pct measure by 1.1 (increase it by 10%).

    I’ve also emailed the screenshot of when this error occurs.

    1. Whenever I want to Add or Modify multiple Calculated Fields, the system crashes after I create or modify a field. I have to kill Excel through Task Manager in order to clear everything out. So if I want to add/modify 10 Calculated fields I have to add one, kill excel, restart, and then produce with the next one 10 separate times. I’m using Excel 2016 on a Windows 10 64 bit environment

  5. Transformed an Excel file in Power query. Loaded it data model. Openned in POWERPIVOT, and then a pivot table. TRied to close and save, but it locked up, so i ctrl alt deleted it

  6. Changing a measure name while that measure is still in a Pivot Table results in the measure name changing in all places other than the Pivot Field List.

    Trying to edit that measure using Right Click Edit in the Pivot Table field list then causes Excel to Crash

    Excel 2016 64 Bit

    Happens currently on 2 different machines in 2 different companies.

  7. Working within native formula editor of Power Pivot, when I try to Check Formula sometimes Excel stops responding and eventually crashes. This happens even with the most simplest formulas.

  8. I attempted to delete a calculated measure, do a Refresh, then do a Save one click after another without stopping. Should be easy but the system locked up. I suspected Power Pivot was very busy and didn’t like the multiple commands. After waiting 10 or 15 minutes, I did an ALT-CTL-Delete to force Excel to end task.

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