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 you browse to your SharePoint site, you get this. You have to enter your user name and password from scratch every time.
This has been a deal breaker for me as it is very annoying for the user. I raised this issue with my friends over at PortalFront and they found a great solution that solves this problem.
PortalFront suggested that I use Atomic Browser. I went ahead and downloaded both the free version and the paid version from the App Store to my iPad and did some testing – it works great.
The lite version is great to get started, but I like the full version more. The 2 main benefits of the paid version vs the lite version (for PowerPivot workbook usage anyway) are
- There is a passcode that you can set to open the browser – protecting your UserName and password that is saved in the Browser.
- You can set it to automatically jump to full screen mode – making for an even better user experience.
In addition you are supporting the developers of good software when you purchase the paid version.
The Atomic Browser SharePoint iPad Experience
As soon as you launch either version of Atomic and go to your PowerPivot Workbook page, you get the Atomic Authentication screen – and you CAN save your SharePoint UserName and Password on this screen
Just click on “submit” and it launches the Workbook on the screen. If you have the paid version, it will automatically switch to full screen mode, so you get this.
No Browser Bar, no Tabs – nothing but full screen PowerPivot Workbook browsing – sweeeeet.
You an read the full details of PortalFront’s recommendations on password saving here
Thanks Matt. I downloaded the full version & can browse to the PowerPivot Gallery no problems but can’t get any further as it says I need to install Silverlight to see the files there.
If I grab the URL for one of my PowerPivot files from my Windows browser then enter this directly in Atomic, the whole browser freezes.
How did you get access to the PowerPivot files? Am I missing something?
Thanks
Hi Jeff
Yes – PowerPivot Gallery doesn’t work on iPad, but PowerPivot does work if you do it right. In addition, while PowerPivot Gallery is the best “quick start” approach, it is not my personally preferred approach. The same solution that works for iPad is also my preferred approach for desktop.
I recommend to do the following
1. Load your workbooks into a document library – a PowerPivot Gallery is also fine.
2. Create a SharePoint page for each workbook (1 sheet per workbook).
3. Add an Excel Web Part to the page
4. Connect the Excel Web Part to the workbook.
5. Add a menu item for each page.
I am in the process of creating some videos for my customers on how to do this. I would like to be further down the track but unfortunately (or fortunately – depending on your view) I have been very busy and am not as advanced as I would like. I do have a few “rough” videos that I will send to you via a link. I will have these available on my website soon for subscribers to my hosted service.
Hi Charlie – you are right, that is a real pain. Sorry – I dont know of any way to solve this properly. What I have done is create additional slicers for users that combine regular multiple selections into a new slicer
Eg if State 1, 2, 3 were the responsibility of 1 person and 3, 4 were another, I would create a new slicer for person 1 and 2 that sits on the state table. Now I realise this is not very flexible, but it could solve most of the common needs
Thanks for the info – I was wondering if you have found a solution to the limitation that slicers are not that effective on an iPad – in that one can not select more than one, but not all slicer items
Thanks