PowerPivot Compatibility across versions

re: PowerPivot Compatibility across versions

Chien-sheng Tsai — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 05:22:05 GMT

Bought several different PowerPivot books and trying to learn, but have not been too successful. In spite of the hype and all the books written by so many authors, PowerPivot just does not seem ready for prime time use. The idea is good, but so many issues, and so much time required to track errors down--almost not worth the trouble--and now find it difficult to trust PowerPivot.

I am in a learning mode, so not mission critical. If I were to rely upon PowerPivot to build a real application, it would be problematic.

So much promise heralded in the books, and such potential, all wasted in the poor execution. Good thing it is a free add-in. Very disappointing. No wonder the other vendors are still doing well. MS had potential of being # 1 in self-service BI with PPVT, if it worked well.

I am running Excel 2010 32-bit on Vista 64-bit with 16 GB RAM and Quad-Core CPU, so it is not that my machine is inadequate.

amount of interest

re: PowerPivot Compatibility across versions

Marco Russo (SQLBI) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 07:21:44 GMT

Thank you for the feedback.

In order to be useful (for articles and book), can you be more specific about the reasons why you are not successful using PowerPivot?

Is this because of DAX Language, some bug in the product, some limitation in calculation and/or data modeling, ... ?

What do you see in other product that is better in this regards?

Thanks again,

Marco

re: PowerPivot Compatibility across versions

Kuba — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:09:31 GMT

Hi Marco,

my name is Kuba and I hope you could help me with issues I encounter with Powerpivot. I created a report based on a simple data model. It has a significant amount of data, however I thought it is still acceptable from Powerpivot perspective. The file is around 100MB.

I use a machine with 8 cores and 16 GB of RAM. However, if I start playing with different attributes from data and move them around ROWS, COLUMNS and FILTERS, I end up with Excel eating almost 15GB of RAM. Then, I start receiving strange errors in Powerpivot about expired sessions etc. It seems as if the tool was quite unstable. What I also noticed is that Excel does not release the memory. It does not matter if the report has complex layout and filters or it is as simple as possible - Excel will occupy those 15BB of RAM as long as I reopen the file. Any ideas why it is like that? Is it a memory management bug?

Greetings,

Kuba

re: PowerPivot Compatibility across versions

Marco Russo (SQLBI) — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:18:01 GMT

Kuba, the issue you describe might be related to some measure that materializes data in memory during query. If this is the case, you have some measure in the data model that could be optimized, but it's hard to make such a diagnosis without analyzing the data model in detail.

If the memory raise up also on simple measures such as SUM(table[column]), then the cause could be something else.

In Excel 2013 I observed some instability (and I hope that a Service Pack will be released soon for that) but it's the first time I heard about memory consumption so huge - unless it's caused by some measure.

Marco

re: PowerPivot Compatibility across versions

MerchandisePlanner — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:25:34 GMT

I am facing problems regarding the stability of the Power pivot that it keep crshing on me & I am loyhe data. many times I have faced the message (Document not saved) & always when I close the power pivot window the whole excel sheets is crashing & the windows asking me to explor the internet to find a solution & every time no solution appears.

I appreciat your support

re: PowerPivot Compatibility across versions

Marco Russo (SQLBI) — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:54:10 GMT

Which version crashes? You should open an incident with Microsoft Support for this type of issues in order to get some assistance. I have experienced some instability but more with Excel 2013 than with Excel 2010.

Marco

re: PowerPivot Compatibility across versions

Massimo — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:10:25 GMT

Hi Marco,

can i open a Excel 2013 file (with a PowerPivot and a PowerView, without Tabular Model) in a Sharepoint 2010 PowerPivot Gallery (with SQL2012)?

Thanks

Greetings,

massimo

re: PowerPivot Compatibility across versions

Marco Russo (SQLBI) — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:24:59 GMT

Massimo, you need SharePoint 2013 in order to open an Excel 2013 file with PowerPivot and/or PowerView.

Marco