Today I observed an issue on a notebook where Excel 2016 was installed and then removed, going back to Excel 2013. After this operation, workbooks having a Power Pivot data model were working correctly by navigating data in PivotTables, but any operation in the Power Pivot window (such as adding columns, tables, or editing ...

I recently write a small article on SQLBI to describe how to create a DAX measure that search for items that have all the items selected in a slicer, instead of any of them. For example, you might want to create a measure that display how many customers bought at least one product for each of the categories selected in a slicer. You cannot ...

Calculating the number of new and returning customers is a recurring question. I would say this is a “classical” Business Intelligence problem, very common in marketing department. I worked on these problems with many customers, with small and large datasets, and I wrote a DAX Pattern “New and Returning Customers” showing how to calculate: New ...

During the keynote of the PASS Business Analytics Conference, Amir Netz presented the new forecasting capabilities in Power View for Office 365. I immediately tried the new feature (which was immediately available, a welcome surprise in a Microsoft announcement for a new release) and I had several issues trying to use existing data models. The ...

Many people requested me how to connect to Power Pivot from an external program, without publishing the workbook on SharePoint or on Analysis Services Tabular. I always said it is not possible (for both technical and licensing reasons), but someone observed that Tableau is able to extract data from a Power Pivot data model connecting directly to ...

I received this request in many courses, messages and also forum discussions: having an Analysis Services Tabular model, it would be nice being able to extract a correspondent PowerPivot data model. In order of priority, here are the specific feature people (including me) would like to see: Create an empty PowerPivot workbook with the same ...

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 ...