An interesting experience with Office Click-to-Run is that trusting it to install updates the night before a conference where you are a speaker. I’m writing this blog post while Alberto Ferrari is delivering its part of the preconference training day at SQL Bits about how to create a complete solution in Power BI. But I think it’s important to ...

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 ...

I recently tried Excel for iPad and tried opening several workbooks. The results are pretty good, but I’ve found that it wasn’t possible to display certain workbooks. For example, opening a workbook that contains many CUBEVALUE formulas, I should have seen this result: However, sometime I’ve got an error saying that the workbook cannot be ...

I’m a frequent user of OneNote and so was delighted with today’s news that there is now a public API available so that third party apps and services can put stuff into your OneNote notebooks (an API? welcome to the modern web, OneNote). One of those third party services is ifttt so I’ve set up a few ifttt recipes to dump stuff into OneNote: ...

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 ...

More than one year ago, I and Alberto started recording videos for Project Botticelli, and now we have a set of videos about DAX that you can watch online. There are a few videos free, and others are available in the monthly subscription. If you are interested, use this 20% discount code before the end of the December 2013: SQLBI20HOLS2013 The ...

I love me a good keyboard shortcut and there’s some I would like to use in Excel all the time if only I could darn well remember them. CTRL+ Spacebar   Select the entire column containing the currently selected cell(s) Shift + Spacebar   Select the entire row ...

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 ...