Category Archives: PowerPivot

Hey, Who Moved My (PowerPivot 2013) Cheese? – PowerPivotPro

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That’s so very awkward…

You can’t get PowerPivot 2013 with Office Professional 2013. It’s available only with Office 2013 Professional *Plus*. Oh wait a moment. You can’t get Office 2013 Professional Plus just like that. It can be get ONLY with Office 365 subscription.

PowerPivotPro has got a post which explains this crazy thing.

Mark Polino, over at DynamicAccounting.net, has got his views too on this.

UPDATE: MSDynamicsWorld has got another post. Must read.

I do not know what to say about this. Just plain illogical for any customer to go for an Office 365 subscription JUST for PowerPivot and get screwed with monthly/annual subscription fees. Mark was so very right. PLUS stands for Please Let Us Screw you.

VAIDY

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Stored Procedure as Data Source in PowerPivot – Issue & Solution

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I am working on a PowerPivot based analysis design and my data source is a SQL Stored Procedure which does the following:

1. Inserts set of records from one DB into a Table Variable.
2. Inserts similarly structured set of records from another DB into the same Table Variable.
3. Finally retrieves records by SELECT…GROUP BY… statement based on necessary criteria.

The above is to ensure that I don’t end up troubleshooing Temp table issues or data redundancy or performance issues for that matter.

PowerPivot understands the above stored procedure very clearly and it also validates the execute query without any issues. It even shows the result set in preview. But it throws the following error message after all the steps involved in setting up SP as data source:

The above error message is quite less informative. I initially thought Stored Procedures are not properly supported by PowerPivot (how silly I am…!!!). But I just gave myself some more time to search forums as usual. After all, I spent almost a day in getting that Stored Procedure completed with 100% accurate results.
The following is the SIMPLE FIX to that menacing issue:
Yeah that’s it. SET NOCOUNT ON is that simple fix. Now my PowerPivot understands this SP and works merrily.
The Post I got this answer from: PowerPivot and Stored Procedure as a SQL Source.
The answer is given by Microsoft Product Team and that was conveyed by Lisa Liu CSS, a Microsoft Moderator.
The reason for why we ought to set NOCOUNT ON is given in the same post by Devarajan KM. The reason is: Set NOCOUNT to ON so that you get only one result set arrived after execution.
VAIDY

List of Attractive BI Technologies from Microsoft

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This was my second session today at Tech-Ed 2011 Middle East. Very interesting and demos were extremely useful to understand all the BI Technologies listed.

Now what exactly are we talking about? The session was all about listing the most promising (some are already existing) BI Tools running on top of either OR all of the following: SQL Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010, Silverlight.

The following are the list:


  1. SharePoint Excel Services
  2. PowerPivot Galleries
  3. PerformancePoint (Dashboards, Scorecards & KPIs)
  4. PowerPivot for SharePoint
  5. Pivot Tool – based on Silverlight
  6. Bing Data Connector – To show geospatial data
  7. SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services (Report Builder)


Each of them will take it’s own time to allow user to understand the basics. I let my readers to BING or GOOGLE these terminologies and learn it.

But, the above list is what Microsoft concentrates more on currently to let users create the most attractive BI for them.

Enjoy.

VAIDY