I'm so happy that DAX Studio finally supports Excel 2013! As Darren Gosbell described in his blog, this release has a few internal changes that will better support future enhancements. I will port the code to capture the query plan for a query in this new release, but unfortunately it will require some weeks because I'm traveling a lot in these ...

Microsoft released the Workbook Size Optimizer for Excel, the first version of an Excel add-in for Excel 2013 that inspects the data model and suggest possible optimizations. Fundamentally, it tries to apply the best practices descripted in a white paper I mentioned a few weeks ago, removing useless columns and changing granularity to those that ...

During a PowerPivot Workshop course we received an interesting question from a student: “Can I use LASTNONBLANK (and FIRSTNONBLANK) with a column which is not a date column?” The reason is that we introduce LASTNONBLANK in the Advanced Time Intelligence module, because its typical use case is on a date column. However, you can use these functions ...

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 ...

The Microsoft has launched the new Office 2013, we are proud to announce the availability of the new PowerPivot Workshop for Excel 2013! We have a fresh new website that offers all the training options: online and classroom courses. The target of this training are Excel Advanced Users and there are two versions of the workshop: the BASIC version ...

Kasper de Jonge wrote a blog post last year introducing an interesting new feature in Excel 2013: you can write a DAX query that extracts data from the PowerPivot model and returns a table in Excel. Such a table can be used as a Linked table for the same PowerPivot model, creating an interesting opportunity to inject data in a data model mixing ...

There are several versions of PowerPivot available and starting with Excel 2013 there are also several versions of Excel. It is useful to look at the compatibility between the different versions of Excel and PowerPivot available now. As a general rule when you have a PowerPivot workbook saved with a specific version of PowerPivot: You can ...

Short update about community events in Europe where I will speak. On October 11 I will present DAX in Action in Köln - all details in the PASS local chapter here: http://www.sqlpass.de/Regionen/Deutschland/K%C3%B6lnBonnD%C3%BCsseldorf.aspx I will be speaking at a community event in Copenhagen on November 21, 2012. The session will be Excel 2013 ...

The new Excel 2013 preview is publicly available and it introduces many new features, like an integrated version of PowerPivot and Power View. These two add-ins are automatically installed but not enabled by default. You just have to go in Excel Options / Add-Ins and choose COM Add-ins from the Manage combo box, then press the Go… button; at this ...

A few days ago a post about VSTO-based PowerPivot Workbook in the PowerPivot Team Blog shown a workaround for the lack of PowerPivot API in Excel. In reality, I don’t like this workaround at all, because it relies on displaying message boxes to the end user in order to click “Update” button in the PowerPivot Ribbon. I understand the reasons why ...