A couple of weeks ago the first version of Vizubi has been released. It is an Excel AddIn with many of the features of PowerPivot, but also with a few important differences. I made some tests and in this post I give my first impression of the product.  Read more

There are already several posts in the blogosphere about the need of using a separate Dates table in PowerPivot to make almost any type of analysis. An important step you should make whenever you have a Dates table (almost always, in theory!) is to hide  Read more

Last week I’ve been at Microsoft BI Conference and I presented an interactive session about PowerPivot DAX Patterns. Unfortunately only the breakout session were recorded and available on TechEd Online . The room was full and there were probably many  Read more

Now that Office 2010 has been released, many people will start looking for resources to start learning PowerPivot. Of course, the book I’m writing will be helpful when it will be published (September 2010), but you can also start with some online content  Read more

Today I prepared a table of the many rounding functions available in DAX (yes, it’s part of the book we’re writing), so that I have a complete schema of the better function to use, depending on the round operation I need to do. Here is the list of functions  Read more

When you install SQL 2008 R2 workstation components you get a newer version of BIDS (BI Developer Studio, included in the workstation components) that replaces BIDS 2008 version (BIDS 2005 still live side-by-side). Everything would be good if you can  Read more

I just read the Dave Wickert post about his sessions about PowerPivot from Microsoft at TechEd 2010 in New Orleans (June 7-10, 2010) and there are at least two things I’d like to add. First of all, there is also another conference! In fact, this time  Read more

As you might already know, I and Alberto Ferrari are writing a book about PowerPivot 2010 for Excel. The official title is Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning and you can already order it on Amazon ! However, it will be published  Read more

This is off-topic here on SQLBlog, I know, but I think there will be many users like me wanting to find the solution for this problem. If you have SpeedFiler there is a problem installing it on Outlook 2010. The setup of SpeedFiler stop showing this message:  Read more

Most of my database model are written with Visio. I don’t want to start a digression whether Visio is good or not to build a simple data model: Visio is enogh for my modeling needs and customers love its colours and the ability to open the model with  Read more