The FAQ

PowerPivot FAQ “But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

     -Bono

“In answer to your query, they’re written down for me.”

     -Blade Runner Holden

 

We’re fortunate to already have a number of great sources of PowerPivot information – the official site, some great blogs, and several forums.

We now find ourselves with a familiar problem, though:  given the breadth of the PowerPivot product, finding the answer to a specific question is often difficult unless you’ve been following all of those sources since their inception.  Digging through archives isn’t a lot of fun, even when assisted by a search engine.

So here it is…

Click Here to Visit the Great PowerPivot FAQ

Contributing to the FAQ

Most of the q’s in the FAQ as of today came from a list I’d been maintaining in Excel, and I’ll of course be adding to it over time, but I hope to not be the only one responsible for all of this :)

So if you want to contribute, here are the three ways to do so:

  1. You can email me a question and answer (or post it in comments).  If I agree that it qualifies for the FAQ, I will post it to the FAQ and credit you as the contributor.
  2. You can send me an answer to a currently unanswered question, and again I’ll credit you.  Notice there’s an “Answered?” column in the FAQ, and there are a few “No’s” in there.
  3. I’m also hoping to have a few co-moderators who have edit rights.  I have a few people in mind and will be contacting them directly.  Depending on response, I might open it up to volunteers.

I don’t have enough logins to go around, and certainly don’t want to open anonymous editing, so for now that’s gonna have to be the system.

New Features of the FAQ

Have you ever noticed the View dropdown?  It contains 3 items of note:

View Dropdown_thumb[6]

Latest View

This view shows you the most recently updated FAQ items at the top.  Useful if you just want to see what’s new on a particular day.

Portuguese Translation View

Yes, this is real :)  Thiago Zavaschi has been translating FAQ content from English to Portuguese, to satisfy the hungry PowerPivot audience in Brazil :)

If you see a need for another language translation and would like to volunteer, please let me know.  It’s very easy for me to set up another view.

Unanswered Questions View

I know, hard to believe, but there actually ARE a few questions posted that have no answers yet.

If you see a question here that you know the answer to, please drop me or any of the moderators a note.  We will credit you with the answer :)

Why SharePoint?

I chose to use SharePoint because it gives me a convenient publishing mechanism – I get a hyperlinked table of contents for free, without manually having to keep that up to date in HTML.  It also gives readers the ability to sort and filter, and I can annotate with additional columns as needed.  I can use that site to publish all kinds of other stuff, too – other lists, wikis, whatever.  (If you have suggestions let me know.)

Also, the Data Grid view let me directly copy/paste my existing list of questions and answers from Excel directly into SharePoint.

And all hosted for $9 a month (as long as I’m ok with anonymous access, which I am).  Not bad.

15 Responses to “The FAQ”

  1. Jenny Goddard Says:
    January 12, 2010 at 5:20 am | Reply

    Hi. Thanks for the great site, it has been lots of help! I have a few questions and I’m not sure if they are worthy of the FAQ, but I thought I’d give them a try, as I have not yet come up with answers.

    1 – How can you get away from the set display formats (two charts, one chart and a pivot etc)? If you add new charts/pivots into the sheet can they be linked to the existing slicers?

    2 – Can you disassociate a chart from a slicer. For example, 2 charts with 2 slicers and I want the 2nd chart to only change with the 1st slicer (there is some logic to this even if it sounds strange).

    3 – Is there a good DAX solution for variences between data within a table. For example, a table of financial data with actual and budget data can easily produce a pivot table of account type vs Actual/Budget but I have been unable to create a varience as a measure without adding extra calculated columns.

    Thanks, Jenny Goddard (Blueprint, UK)

    • powerpivotpro Says:
      January 12, 2010 at 12:21 pm | Reply

      Hi Jenny, thanks for the kinds words :) Glad the site is helpful.

      1 and 2 – definitely FAQ-worthy. I have posted the start of an answer on the FAQ site. Will research a little bit to see what kinds of hacks are possible if any.

      3 – sure sounds like something we can do with a measure. Are you doing something like SUM([Actual]) – Sum([Budget])? Without seeing more detail on your scenario, my blind guess is that perhaps you are using “naked” columns in your measure, which is a syntax error. Measures deal only in aggregate functions. See the powerpivotpro channel on youtube for some how-to’s on measures http://www.youtube.com/powerpivotpro

  2. Jenny Goddard Says:
    January 13, 2010 at 4:47 am | Reply

    Really helpful answers, thanks. I had not found the “Slicer Connections” before, so this really solves my problem.

  3. Tony Says:
    January 28, 2010 at 6:12 am | Reply

    Hi Rob,

    Congrats on the site and on PowerPivot itself.

    Is DateDiff type functionality available within PowerPivot?

    Some uses I have in mind include calculating elapsed times from dates of birth and from dates of referral to a service.

    Thanks,
    Tony.

  4. Trev H Says:
    February 10, 2010 at 6:03 am | Reply

    Hi

    What is the best way to bring in SAP BW data. I heard the best way was to bring it in via a reporting services report. I have two problems with that, the first is that we dont have SQL 2008 RS only SQL 2005. The second is that it seems nuts to have to build a reporting services report everytime we want to bring in new BW data. Are there no drivers that we can use. I suppose we could export the BW data into a text file and then powerpivot that but it would be great to connect directly to the BW query and play with the data. Thanks

    • powerpivotpro Says:
      February 10, 2010 at 8:16 am | Reply

      I don’t personally have the answer for you yet, but I have seen the question quite a bit now. I have posted it as an unanswered question.

      And this also prompted me to post an update letting everyone know about the new Unanswered Questions View.

    • Jeremy Says:
      February 10, 2010 at 10:37 am | Reply

      If this is possible this could really be a game changer for me! So many possibilities of creating awesome dynamic dashboards without having to run a BW report first and then importing it into excel/powerpivot. Take away that whole step and have it be automatic will give me tons more time to actually create cool stuff instead of always running lots of canned reports everyday.

  5. Jeremy Says:
    February 11, 2010 at 1:40 pm | Reply

    Tx! I still won’t be able to use this stuff anytime soon but I love learning new stuff especially when it deals with excel. Microsoft is going to have to push these services hard to big corporations as I know my company won’t be upgrading to Sharepoint 2010 anytime soon.

    • powerpivotpro Says:
      February 11, 2010 at 1:54 pm | Reply

      Would it be useful/possible to deploy a single SharePoint 2010 server? Because I don’t think we require the whole company to upgrade the SharePoint backone.

      • Jeremy Says:
        February 11, 2010 at 2:07 pm

        That I don’t know the answer for. I do not work in our IT dept. I am just a Analyst for a Brand inside our company. I am one of a kind where the other brands don’t have a “me”. I get to fiddle around and create reports based off of SAP BW data. But nothing dynamic like this. My company has been rolling out sharepoint across the company the past year and it still kinda in its infancy for us. I am all for this stuff and I can’t wait to be able to learn more about how to use this! I have it on my home pc but the ability to link it via excel services is where I feel this will shine.. Keep up the good work and keep the blog posts coming along!

        This is the email I got a while back from our Sharepoint developer.. I already told him just the developer needs the Office 2010/PowerPivot. But knowing us it will still be a few years.. :(

        I agree that this could be a powerful tool for enabling users to build some of their own reporting functionality. However, there are a few hurdles to overcome before it can even be seriously considered:
        • PowerPivot/Gemini is an Excel 2010 plugin. Office 2010 is still in Beta, and we (WWW) are barely getting onto 2007 over 3 years after release. I am not aware of a WWW 2010 upgrade plan (but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one).
        • This functionality relies on Excel Services on a SharePoint 2010 platform
        o SharePoint 2010 is currently in Beta and a release date hasn’t even been announced; it is unknown if/when we will upgrade
        o Excel Services is an Enterprise licensed feature, meaning that each user that employs the functionality (or has access to a site that has it enabled) must have an additional client access license – current pricing is about $100 per CAL in SharePoint 2007, but pricing hasn’t been announced for 2010 yet

  6. SAP BI Consultant Says:
    February 26, 2010 at 5:25 pm | Reply

    Hi Jeremy, hi Rob,

    I had the same idea like Jeremy to test the retrieval of data which is provided by SAP BW. No surprise that I also wanted to check this – I am a SAP BI consultant ;-) Don´t worry Rob, I am not an employee of SAP, I am only an independent, self-employed SAP BI consultant. Due to the currently enormous changes/challenges (and the incredibly long lasting confusion) of SAP in the area of the BI frontend tools (BO Tools, new developments such as the new Pioneer frontend which btw partly looks pretty similar to Power Pivot) I am more and more looking for alternatives – out of frustration with the chaotic product strategy. Therefore I had a look on PowerPivot which looks pretty nice, but I also missed the possibility to access the SAP BW. Which is a bit surprising, since SAP BW is increadibly widespread in many big corporations nowadays.

    Having checked the Connection a bit more in depth there is good news and bad news.

    The good news at first:

    There is indeed already a possibility to connect to a SAP BW query. Just go to the button “From Database”, then choose the entry “Others (OLE DB/ODBC)”. A window will open up and there you can see the button “Create”. Hitting this button, another window will open up and there you will see four different tabs. You will start on the second tab which is named “Connection”. But you need to go to the first tab which is named “Provider”. Doing this you will see a list of many different OLE DB/ODBC drivers. If you scroll down, you will see the entry for “SAP BW OLE DB driver”. This is in general one possibilty to connect to the SAP BW system. Of course it presumes that your SAP BW query has been flagged as SAP OLE DB query – which is not the standard when a new SAP BW query is built (not necessary). It is just a flag in the SAP BEx Query designer. If you want to go for this solution, then I recommend to copy an existing query, go to the change mode of the query designer and set this flag. This is all you need to do and then you can use this query for PowerPivot as a dataprovider.
    So, up to here everything looks pretty good. Once you chose this entry SAP BW OLE DB provider, you need to to go to the second tab (Connection) and then you go to point 3. Since I am using the German version of PowerPoint I will not even try to translate this point 3. I guess in English it will be named differently from what I believe it might be translated correctly. Anyway, here you choose the drop down box and immediately the famous SAP Logon Screen will pop up, where you need to enter your SAP BW user name and password. Having done this it takes a few seconds and the same drop down box will open up again and offer you all those BW queries which are flagged as OLE DB queries.
    From here you should be only a few seconds away from being happy.

    But as always in life, there is not only light, but also some shadow. :-(

    Now the bad news comes:

    Everything works fine up to here. Even if you choose one of the OLE DB capable SAP BW queries, it still looks fine. You confirm then with OK and then PowerPivot will start to work… and work… and work. Then – after some time – the window will freeze and… Shit, Excel will crash. I tried it several times, but it does not work – or let me say: It works all the times very similar – it crashes.

    Summarizing all this, it means: Already today PowerPivot theoretically has built in the ability to access the SAP BW by accessing SAP BW queries. The precondition is that those people who are SAP BW query designers in your company make a copy of the query for you, flag it as OLE DB capable query and transport this to the production system. Then nearly everything you need is provided. The only limitation right now is that Microsoft needs to find out, why the PowerPivot including Excel crashes… ;-) Once they found the bug, the solution should work… in theory at least… ;-)

    There is currently no possibility to access the SAP BW cubes directly which is really a very pity, because since Release 7.0 there are quite a few different possibilities also to access the cubes directly with 3rd party tools. One possibility is the XMLA interface which originally was developed by Microsoft by the way… :-) and which works fine. We just tried it with another 3rd party tool.

    Even if I cannot provide you a working solution right now, I hope that I at least could make clear that there is a potential way to directly access SAP BW data, in case that Microsoft finds out why its product currently still crashes when using the SAP BW OLE DB provider.

    Best regards,

    Joachim

Leave a Reply