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 […]
I really love PowerPivot and Power Query. I have been doing Rob Collie’s on line training course on using PowerPivot. When I got to the section on Time Intelligence, it occurred to me that Power Query could be used to create the date table that you need. I did a […]
There is a good Microsoft site for the Power Query M formula language reference. There is a lot of really useful information about the key functions of the language on that page, and I recommend it for anyone that is looking to do more with Advanced Power Query functions. If you […]
A couple of weeks ago Microsoft held a full day online session called Faster Data Insights With Power BI. There were 8 sessions of about 50 mins each that covered various aspects of the new Power BI suite. The sessions have now been converted to YouTube videos and are available […]
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 […]