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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]