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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 …

If you’re unable to refresh the data and you’re seeing the following issue (below) when trying to refresh content, follow the steps described below. Note this was written with SharePoint 2010 in mind, but it should apply equally to SP2013. The “PowerPivot Data” value will be whatever the name of your connection is (see below). …

I’ve had the odd occasion where the SharePoint PowerPivot thumbnails (in the gallery view) haven’t shown up properly for me, and a while ago I compiled a collection of debugging procedures. I figured I’d share this collection with the world. Some of these were meant more for SP2010, and SQL 2008 / R2, but many …

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 …

As detailed in this post on the topic, you may sometimes see the follow error message when running a PowerPivot report (either when opening the report, running an explicit data refresh, or it may pop up on its own if the worksheet is setup to refresh automatically).  You may also encounter this error in other …

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 …