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 ...

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 ...

I have a burgeoning interest in the world of Open Data which wikipedia describes as: Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other ...

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 ...