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It’s finally been announced that the Office 2016 Public Preview is now available. I’ve seen a few early previews of this as an MVP and have quite liked what I saw (they’re sticking with the KISS principles and yet adding ever more power/functionality to the suite). I encourage you to go and take a look …

Join me and piles of others in the MVP vConference (online). See below for more details. Here is a high level overview of the event: World-class free online conference that features technical content presented by Americas’ region MVPs that is open to the public More technical content (Level 200, 300, 400), less marketing 5 tracks: …

A while back a customer wanted to combine external data sources and SharePoint together, and they thought the best way to do it was with Excel PowerPivot. Their intentions were in the right vein, but the possible path of execution didn’t actually exist. The idea being that they wanted to use a tool (Excel PowerPivot …

I recently was working with a customer and trying to get a PowerPivot workbook working. We were running into the following error. I found the following blog post, which helped me get past the issue. http://www.bidn.com/blogs/DevinKnight/ssis/5362/dealing-with-power-pivot-to-tabular-upgrade-errors The recommendation in the blog post is as follows: Translation: The Service Account that is running the SSAS Tabular …

Recently I needed to be able to remove a known string from the end of a text column in PowerPivot.  In my case, I had a client column, and in some cases the client column contained values with a colon and X on the end (such as “Bob’s Fishery:X”).  Using the expression below, I was …

I’ve found that when using the DAX search function that I often need to include the two optional parameters (“start num” and “not found value”).  SEARCH(<find_text>, <within_text>[, [<start_num>][, <NotFoundValue>]]) I’ll explain the reasoning behind my statement.  What I’ve found when not using the optional parameters, if that if you have no matching value from your …

If you want to get a range of cells (say person names) concatenated together in a single cell, you’ll find that you’re not able to provide the concatenate function with a range.  However, you can tell Excel to expand that cell’s range quite easily.     A B 1 Bob   2 Sally   3 …

When trying to connect to data in PowerPivot everything seems to work fine when you’re setting up your data connections, setting up your relationships, and then once you go to return back to the Excel window by virtue of creating a PivotTable, you suddenly see the following error.   Message: Excel Window: PowerPivot Field List …

When trying to load PowerPivot on Excel 2010 in a brand new install (with PowerPivot just added to my Excel environment), and after a reboot, I was unable to get the PowerPivot tab to load, and going into the add-in’s and trying to load the PowerPivot add-in for “COM Add-ins” wasn’t working. After some digging, …

To paraphrase a wise man, once you’ve got PowerPivot, “all your SharePoint’s are belong to us”.  I’m going to demonstrate how, using Excel 2013 (which has PowerPivot built right in – you just have to enable it), and SharePoint 2013 you can really easily be crunching some of your SharePoint data, without ever having to …