New PowerPivot 2013 book available! #excel #powerpivot

sqlbi — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:25:00 GMT

Our new book about PowerPivot 2013 is finally available in printed edition, too!

The title is Microsoft Excel 2013: Building Data Models with PowerPivot and it is a partial rewriting of the previous book about PowerPivot for Excel 2010. In the previous book we had a target audience that included advanced Excel users and BI developers, because at that time there was no option to get the same engine in Analysis Services. But 30 months are elapsed, a new version of Analysis Services has been released and in this new book we focused mainly on Excel users. For this reason, we wrote a comprehensive book of all the feature of PowerPivot, but most important we tried to pass concepts of data modeling that might be pretty obvious for a DBA and a BI developer, but are completely new to an Excel user that never had the ability to create a data model with more than one table.

This book is focused on Excel 2013, so we included specific feature of this release related to PowerPivot, such as writing DAX queries and linked back tables, and features unique to Excel 2013, such as Power View. However, all of the PowerPivot features (so the 85% of the book) are good also for PowerPivot for Excel 2010 in its latest release (SQL Server 2012 SP1 PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010), so you can safely use this book for both version of Excel.

You can download the first chapter of the book from the book page on SQLBI web site. And if you want to attend a training in a classroom or online, look at the complete list of available trainings on PowerPivot Workshop web site. The next online courses are scheduled on April 22-24, 2013 and June 17-19, 2013 (following online workshops are every other month).

Here are the links to directly order the book on Amazon around the world:

Amazon.com: hardcopy – kindle
Amazon.ca: hardcopy – kindle
Amazon.co.uk: hardcopy – kindle
Amazon.de: hardcopy – kindle
Amazon.es: hardcopy – kindle
Amazon.fr: hardcopy – kindle
Amazon.it: hardcopy – kindle

And here is the list of chapters:

Chapter 1 Introduction to PowerPivot
Chapter 2 Using the unique features of PowerPivot
Chapter 3 Introducing DAX
Chapter 4 Understanding data models
Chapter 5 Publishing to SharePoint
Chapter 6 Loading data
Chapter 7 Understanding evaluation contexts
Chapter 8 Understanding CALCULATE
Chapter 9 Using Hierarchies
Chapter 10 Using Power View
Chapter 11 Shaping the Reports
Chapter 12 Performing Date Calculations in DAX
Chapter 13 Using Advanced DAX
Chapter 14 Using DAX as a Query Language
Chapter 15 Automating Operations Using VBA
Chapter 16 Comparing Excel and SQL Server Analysis Services

This book should help you starting with PowerPivot at the very beginning, and you will probably use only the first chapters at that point. Over time, you will use following chapters and will learn more advanced techniques. This is not a book you can digest in a couple of days (after all, it is 500 pages long!), it will be your companion for several months, until you will master PowerPivot!

Many-to-many in #BISM Tabular issue in #crescent and #powerview

sqlbi — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:06:37 GMT

If you are looking to create many-to-many relationships based models in PowerPivot and in BISM Tabular, probably one day you will be interested in using them with Power View (formerly codename “Crescent”). There is a very bad news for you: it appears that, at least in its first release, Power View will not support this scenario, showing a behavior that (and this really worries me) is very different from Excel.

The description of the issue is in this connect item: please vote it! This is going to seriously impact usability of many models from Crescent. I understand the reason of this choice (avoiding selection that doesn’t make sense) but I would like whether there was a way to disable this automatic hiding feature in particular conditions (that might be the routine for a certain data models).

I will investigate for some workaround, but many votes to this issue may raise its priority in Redmond.

Search results matching tags 'Power View' and 'PowerPivot'

New PowerPivot 2013 book available! #excel #powerpivot

Many-to-many in #BISM Tabular issue in #crescent and #powerview