One new nice feature of Excel 2010 is the Slicer. Usually, slicers are used to filter data in a PivotTable. But they might be also useful to parameterize an algorithm or a chart! We discussed this technique in our book, but Alberto Ferrari wrote a post that shows how to use this technique to allow the user to select two stocks that should be ...

One week ago Alberto Ferrari wrote a post about how to do working days calculation in PowerPivot. You might think this is necessary only for accounting department or something like that… but in reality the same techniques are really useful to implement calculations that might be useful when you want to implement some stock analysis using ...

Microsoft recently announced a new roadmap for its BI architecture. The next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Denali”, is going to introduce a new semantic model named BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model). Analysis Services will host it and it will be queryable through MDX and DAX. DAX has been introduced in PowerPivot as an expression ...

You can download these two sample chapters of the PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning book: Chapter 2 - PowerPivot at Work This is introductive and suggested to read to anyone who is new to PowerPivot Chapter 7 – Date Calculations in DAX Do you want to make date calculation in DAX? This is the chapter for ...

This topic is general and not related to a specific feature of PowerPivot. In the way it is designed today, when data are imported from a SSAS cube into PowerPivot, the dimensionality of the original cube is lost and a flat table is imported as the result of a single MDX query. This approach should work in PowerPivot considering the way data are ...

Every measure imported from a SSAS cube is imported as a Text column instead of as a Numeric column. This is very annoying because users are used to use SSAS data with rich metadata, and a measure is usually numeric. Moreover, the standard aggregation used by PowerPivot for a Text column is Count - whenever the measure is a real count (thus, an ...

If you write direct MDX queries using SSAS 2005/2008 as a PowerPivot data source, it is better if you prepare your MDX query by using another editor. For example, write and test your MDX query by using SQL Server Management Studio and then copy & paste your query into the user interface provided by the Table Import Wizard. The remaining part ...

The query designer in PowerPivot has a few limitations that require the manual modification of the MDX query to get data that are often needed to create a PowerPivot model that compares data from cube with data from other sources (like Excel workbooks or external databases). For example, it is not possible to import the attribute key (the MDX ...

A general problem of any cube is the way PowerPivot handles calculated members. From a technical point of view, it is absolutely correct that PowerPivot imports the result of a calculated member evaluated at the granularity of the query result. However, from the user point of view, it is not pretty clear why importing a calculated member it ...

Companies that have cubes on Analysis Services 2000 and still have not completed a migration to SSAS 2005/2008 might be interested in connecting to AS2000 from PowerPivot. Unfortunately, there are several limitations about using AS2000 as a data source for PowerPivot. Connecting issues The client PC where PowerPivot for Excel runs requires the ...