Well it is the end of day 0 – the pre-conference sessions – prior to the commencement of the actual PASS Business Analytics Conference here in Santa Clara tomorrow. It was hard to pick which of the 4 pre-con sessions to attend but I ended up choosing Chandoo’s session titled […]
I am sitting here in San Jose (Santa Clara actually) ready to attend the PASS Business Analyst Conference. It was hard to get those lyrics out of my head when I was flying to San Jose, but I am sure I will have a clear head once the action begins (I […]
I love VBA for Excel. VBA can automate tasks that you use often, making the process faster, easier and more accurate to execute. I like writing VBA for myself to solve my own problems, I like sharing what I write with others, and I like taking the VBA that others […]
Excel is a bit like a drug for me – the more I use Excel, the more I need to use Excel. I work on a lot of Power Pivot workbooks these days and sometimes these workbooks need to run a refresh or recalc that can take a bit of […]
I was recently asked by an Industry Excel expert what made Excel such a compelling product for Business Intelligence, Reporting and Analysis. As many people know, I have worked in IT as well as commercial business roles over the years, so I have seen ‘both sides’ of the story and […]
Edit 16 May 2015: I now know the exact cause and cure for this problem. See this post here This backup tip is still useful though. This is a follow up to this post where I talked about Power Query and warned to take frequent backups when editing your Power […]
I have come across this problem a few times recently. There was no immediately obvious solution that worked at first. I knew what I wanted to do but I couldn’t get it to work – but now I have a solution and I want to share it for the benefit […]
Microsoft has just released the March ‘15 update to Power Query. On the official blog, MS called out 3 things: Performance improvements Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online connector New transformations Performance improvements? You have my attention. I have found that Power Query (and Power Pivot for that matter) are both slow […]
I’m really excited to be speaking at this year’s PASS Business Analyst Conference in San Jose California. I will be sharing what I have learnt in my time working as BI Director at The Coca-Cola Company about how to share Power Pivot (and other Excel) Workbooks with people that simply want […]
I wrote a blog post on PowerPivotPro.com last week on how to create a standard Power Pivot calendar using Power Query – from scratch. I was doing some research this morning on how I could extend this concept to create a 4/4/5 Calendar (which is often used in the Retail […]
As most subscribers of my blog would already know, I am a professional trainer of Power Pivot here in Australia. I do a lot of work for Corporations at their own premises with their own PC equipment. Not every company has made the move to Excel 2013, and in fact […]
Edit 16 May 2015: I now know the exact cause and cure for this problem. See this post here PhilC at PowerPivotForum.com.au asked me for advice on the best way to use Power Query with Power Pivot. If you have come to this post via Google, it is probably because […]
When Power Pivot was originally released by Microsoft, it was introduced as a Plug-In to Excel 2010. After the second version of the Plug-In was built and released, the Microsoft Build team moved its focus to writing the product into the 2013 release of MS Office. Unfortunately they ran out […]
Well Power Pivot Forum has been live for 8 months now and has over 100 users, more than 400 posts and many thousands of page views. The Power Pivot forum continues to grow as new users are finding the need for help with their DAX problem. Recently one of the […]
I have been meaning to write this post for a long time – today is the day! The answer to the question “What is Power Pivot?“. You may also have landed here by searching for “Use this workbook’s Data Model”. Often the first time people discover Power Pivot is when […]
In this post I cover everything you need to know about the Power Pivot 2013 Update (December 2014), how to get, and what can go wrong. As you may have heard, Microsoft has released a number of patches that improve the stability of Power Pivot, Power View and Power Map […]
When I started learning Power Pivot, I learnt there are 2 ways to import data. There is the “standard way” that uses the table import wizard – good for us Excel folk. There is a second way that uses the Query Editor to write some SQL code and extract the […]
Great news for Power Pivot for Excel users – DAX Studio has had an update over night and version 2.0 is now available. For those of you that don’t know DAX studio, it is an ADDIN that you install for Excel 2010 or 2013. It connects to the Power Pivot […]
One thing I learnt in my early days of PowerPivot was that you should never delete an imported column from a table in PowerPivot. The rationale was that PowerPivot compresses the columns during import, so if you delete them after import, you will lose some of the compression benefits. However […]
Edit 10 Dec 2015: This blog post was written to solve a problem with SQL Server import drivers, however the process of addressing the issue should also work (in reverse) for people that are running 32 bit Office and want to install 64 bit Power BI Desktop. If this is […]