An interesting experience with Office Click-to-Run is that trusting it to install updates the night before a conference where you are a speaker. I’m writing this blog post while Alberto Ferrari is delivering its part of the preconference training day  Read more

Calculating the number of new and returning customers is a recurring question. I would say this is a “classical” Business Intelligence problem, very common in marketing department. I worked on these problems with many customers, with small and large datasets,  Read more

During the keynote of the PASS Business Analytics Conference, Amir Netz presented the new forecasting capabilities in Power View for Office 365. I immediately tried the new feature (which was immediately available, a welcome surprise in a Microsoft announcement  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

Many people requested me how to connect to Power Pivot from an external program, without publishing the workbook on SharePoint or on Analysis Services Tabular. I always said it is not possible (for both technical and licensing reasons), but someone observed  Read more

More than one year ago, I and Alberto started recording videos for Project Botticelli, and now we have a set of videos about DAX that you can watch online. There are a few videos free, and others are available in the monthly subscription. If you are interested,  Read more

I received this request in many courses , messages and also forum discussions: having an Analysis Services Tabular model, it would be nice being able to extract a correspondent PowerPivot data model. In order of priority, here are the specific feature  Read more

I'm so happy that DAX Studio finally supports Excel 2013! As Darren Gosbell described in his blog , this release has a few internal changes that will better support future enhancements. I will port the code to capture the query plan for a query in this  Read more

Microsoft released the Workbook Size Optimizer for Excel , the first version of an Excel add-in for Excel 2013 that inspects the data model and suggest possible optimizations. Fundamentally, it tries to apply the best practices descripted in a white paper  Read more

During a PowerPivot Workshop course we received an interesting question from a student: “Can I use LASTNONBLANK (and FIRSTNONBLANK) with a column which is not a date column?” The reason is that we introduce LASTNONBLANK in the Advanced Time Intelligence  Read more