Yesterday Chris blogged about Varigence Vivid and Bonavista Dimensions. His post remembered me that I might share my comments about Vivid and I had to take a tour around Bonavista Dimensions, and here we are. Varigence Vivid is simply something that enhance PivotTable Excel functionality, especially when you are connected to an Analysis Services ...

The project codenamed Gemini has an official name now: PowerPivot. The complete name should be “PowerPivot for Excel 2010”, but PowerPivot is simpler. I didn’t like that name yesterday, but today it seems better. Microsoft announced this name at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 held in Las Vegas. As usual, demos are good and people are ...

After many tries, today I came to the conclusion that Analysis Services 2005 SP2 breaks the Excel 2007 calculated member selection feature. I already talked about this issue here, but today I found the way to reproduce the error. This is a scenario that works well: Analysis Services 2005 SP1 + hotfixes (build 2153) Excel 2007 RTM Cube ...

Today I had a big trouble with one customer. We migrated an AS2000 solution to SSAS2005, making a lifting to dimensions just to consolidate into attributes what were indipendent dimensions in the old cube. One of the old dimensions contained only one ''dummy'' member, and a series of calculated members. With Excel 2003, you had no troubles ...

Often end users use Excel to navigate into the cube. Then they may ask you to produce a report using the same data. It would be useful to get the MDX query used by Excel. Moreover, Excel 2007 offers a good MDX quality of the produced query against Analysis Services 2005 (much better than Excel 2003). I don't know why Excel doesn't have such a ...