The short answer is yes. The long answer is that Microsoft should still improve in many ways. I thought about this many times before writing this post, because I want to be constructive and I hope that my words will…  Read more

I recently tried Excel for iPad and tried opening several workbooks. The results are pretty good, but I’ve found that it wasn’t possible to display certain workbooks. For example, opening a workbook that contains many CUBEVALUE formulas, I should have…  Read more

In the last few years, I and Alberto Ferrari assisted many users of Power Pivot and Power BI who wanted to create their reports using these tools and were struggling with getting the desired numbers from their data. The first…  Read more

I’ve just attended the Excel 12 BI session held by Amir Netz and Allan Folting. This is the first time that Excel 12 BI functionality are shown to the public. My expectations seems to be satisfied, even if I really…  Read more

Often end users use Excel to navigate into the cube. Then they may ask you to produce a report using the same data. It would be useful to get the MDX query used by Excel. Moreover, Excel 2007 offers a…  Read more

Microsoft recently announced a new roadmap for its BI architecture. The next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Denali”, is going to introduce a new semantic model named BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model). Analysis Services will host it and it will…  Read more

Ranking is useful and, in our book, I and Marco provide a lot of information about how to perform ranking with PowerPivot. Nevertheless, there is an interesting scenario where ranking can be performed without complex DAX formulas, but with just…  Read more

After many tries, today I came to the conclusion that Analysis Services 2005 SP2 breaks the Excel 2007 calculated member selection feature. I already talked about this issue here, but today I found the way to reproduce the error. This is…  Read more

I recently talked about memory usage in PowerPivot and previously I wrote about difference modeling options using table normalization or not. Thus, I wondered whether table normalization is a good practice for performance and memory or not. The short answer…  Read more

You know, selecting calculated members in Excel is not an option. I talked about this issue more than three years ago for the first time: http://www.sqlbi.com/blog/marco/2007/01/31/excel-2007-pivottable-with-calculated-members/ http://www.sqlbi.com/blog/marco/2007/03/07/ssas-2005-sp2-breaks-excel-calculated-member-selection/ http://www.sqlbi.com/blog/marco/2008/12/08/ssas-2008-calculated-members-still-don-t-love-excel-2007/ The upcoming new versions of SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010…  Read more