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 […]
There are a number of different ways that you can refresh PowerPivot workbooks automatically on a schedule. The main ones I know of are: Using Power BI Using SharePoint Auto Refresh Using some sort of custom built desktop automation tool The problem with Power BI and SharePoint The problem with […]
I am a big believer that the browsing experience must be seamless before real world users will fully embrace PowerPivot when mobile. The Standard SharePoint iPad Experience One of my biggest issues up until now has been the inability to save your SharePoint UserName and Password on the iPad. When […]
One thing I find when working with my customers and meeting PowerPivot users is that a lot of people want to know how to access PowerPivot when they are mobile. Most frequently people want to access PowerPivot reports on iPad, however in many cases just presenting data for PC users […]
I recently created a Book Shop on my WordPress website using WooCommerce. The next logical thing I wanted to do was to get an extract of all my orders/invoices that have been sold through the shop into Excel. I couldn’t find a way to do this in the WordPress UI […]
Microsoft has released an upgrade to its Office Apps for iPad (version 1.1) that now includes – wait for it…. PivotTables for iPad Support! Wooohoo. But unfortunately there is good news and bad news. First the good news. You can indeed open a workbook that has PivotTables and you can interact […]
I have been waiting for this book Power Query for Power BI and Excel by Chris Webb for some time and I am pleased to advise it is a great book for a broad range of people with anything from zero to medium skills in Power Query. I fall into the […]
Back in early May I realised that there was not much in the way of a dedicated forum for PowerPivot users, especially for the general user. There are some specialised forums out there for Microsoft Developers but not much for the average user. As a result I went ahead and set up […]
This is a very interesting question “How much does a BI Project cost?”, and one that many people want the answer to. The standard response from IT is “how long is a piece of string?”, and that is a valid response in many senses. ie how would you know how […]
Query Plan Analysis: The 5 Culprits that Cause 95% of Your Performance Headaches I am fairly new to SQL Server, and I am by no means an expert. I learnt my database ‘skills’ using MS Access. In a recent engagement with a client, I had a need for a tool […]
In this session, Matt Masson and Tess Palmer do a great job of showing everyone the depth and power of the Power Query M language that is the backbone of Power Query – it makes my list. Clearly they didn’t expect too many people in the audience to be able […]
This is a continuation of my series on “best of” from TechEd 2014. This session by Kasper de Jonge makes my best of list. It is quite technical in places and digs in deep. I particularly like when he talks about “evaluation context”. Erik explains that there are 2 types […]
This post is a continuation of my last post where I started to provide a curated view of content from TechEd 2014 from the perspective of a Self Service BI professional. Inevitably if I am to share with you the best of the sessions, there are going to be some […]
Last week in Houston Texas, Microsoft held TechEd 2014 (North America, 12-15 May). I was browsing the videos from this conference and wanted to share the wealth of material that is available for anyone to view. If you just filter on the “Data Platform and Business Intelligence stream“, there are […]
Microsoft has announced a new version of Power Query on the MSDN blog this week. There is a full decscription of the new features available at the following link, however I have provided a summary of the key features I am looking forward to. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2014/05/06/new-updates-for-power-query.aspx Features and Benefits New Feature […]
As I spend more and more of my time working full time with PowerPivot and associated Excel products, I have been looking for suitable forums that are focused around PowerPivot. I have not found anything out there that I really like. So I spent some time over the weekend setting […]
I have been doing some work with a customer over the last couple of weeks preparing to produce a new data model. Part of the process is to get an extract of invoices (header detail and line item detail) from the mainframe so that I can easily access all the […]
I had read an interesting request on the Whirlpool forum over the weekend. Whirlpool user Alicia2 wanted to extract Word document metadata into a Spreadsheet. That seemed like an interesting problem and something I could use some time. So I decided to help her out. I built this Spreadsheet that […]
Yesterday I read this post called “Why Excel is costing you millions” by Gayle Ryan. I have never seen a more misleading and ill informed post about Excel, and I was motivated to provide a response to this article here. Ryan starts out by talking about static reporting, and how […]
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