You can download these two sample chapters of the PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning book: Chapter 2 - PowerPivot at Work This is introductive and suggested to read to anyone who is new to PowerPivot Chapter 7 – Date Calculations in DAX  Read more

Banding is one of the most common requirements when you have the need to analyze continuous values, like the retail price of a product which may change over time, due to discounts and price variations. I have already spoken about banding with regards  Read more

This topic is general and not related to a specific feature of PowerPivot. In the way it is designed today, when data are imported from a SSAS cube into PowerPivot, the dimensionality of the original cube is lost and a flat table is imported as the result  Read more

Every measure imported from a SSAS cube is imported as a Text column instead of as a Numeric column. This is very annoying because users are used to use SSAS data with rich metadata, and a measure is usually numeric. Moreover, the standard aggregation  Read more

If you write direct MDX queries using SSAS 2005/2008 as a PowerPivot data source, it is better if you prepare your MDX query by using another editor. For example, write and test your MDX query by using SQL Server Management Studio and then copy &  Read more

The query designer in PowerPivot has a few limitations that require the manual modification of the MDX query to get data that are often needed to create a PowerPivot model that compares data from cube with data from other sources (like Excel workbooks  Read more

A general problem of any cube is the way PowerPivot handles calculated members. From a technical point of view, it is absolutely correct that PowerPivot imports the result of a calculated member evaluated at the granularity of the query result. However,  Read more

Companies that have cubes on Analysis Services 2000 and still have not completed a migration to SSAS 2005/2008 might be interested in connecting to AS2000 from PowerPivot. Unfortunately, there are several limitations about using AS2000 as a data source  Read more

In the next 2 to 3 weeks I will publish a few blog posts about importing data to PowerPivot using Analysis Services as a data source. This is something I studied a lot during the beta test of PowerPivot and it is not a topic that has a place in the upcoming  Read more

The CALCULATE function in DAX is the magic key for many calculations we can do in DAX. However, it is not pretty intuitive how it works and I spent a lot of time trying to understand how it can be used. First of all, this is the syntax. CALCULATE( <expression>,  Read more