The DATE function in DAX has this simple syntax: DATE( <year>, <month>, <day> ) If you are like me, you never read the BOL notes that says in a clear way that it supports dates beginning with March 1, 1900. In fact, I was wrongly assuming that it would have supported any date that can be represented in a Date data type in Data ...

One of the infrequent pleasures of being a data geek like me is that one does occasionally stumble across little-known yet incredibly useful features in a tool that you use day-in, day-out. Today this happened to me and the feature is Excel’s ability to highlight dupicate rows in a worksheet. Check this out: Notice that I have got some data ...

I found an issue upgrading an Excel workbook containing PowerPivot data from Excel 2010 to Excel 2013. All CUBEMEMBER and CUBEVALUE functions point to a cube name that has been changed between the two version – you have to no longer reference the PowerPivot Data name, replacing it with ThisWorkbookDataModel instead. I wrote an article describing ...

Short update about community events in Europe where I will speak. On October 11 I will present DAX in Action in Köln - all details in the PASS local chapter here: http://www.sqlpass.de/Regionen/Deutschland/K%C3%B6lnBonnD%C3%BCsseldorf.aspx I will be speaking at a community event in Copenhagen on November 21, 2012. The session will be Excel 2013 ...

You may have noticed from my recent posts regarding Excel that I have a keen interest in the upcoming release of Office and in particular I’m interested in the capabilities of the Excel web app. One new feature that piqued my interest was that pivot tables and slicers are now displayed in the Excel Web App on SkyDrive and, even better, they are ...

  Three days ago I wrote a rather scathing blog post Power View in SkyDrive where I criticised Microsoft’s collaboration story in Excel 2013 in its various guises. I said then: I clicked on one of those workbooks in order to view it in my web browser and I saw this: “Unable to load the requested workbook” Oh, did they ...

UPDATE 02/08/2012,  I have written an important follow-up to this blog post at Power View in SkyDrive revisited which has better news than what I have written below. Please read that blog post as well as this one. Sean Boon has begun an interesting blog series where he is analysing data from the Olympics using using Power View in ...

If you follow Chris Webb’s blog (and if you’re a BI practitioner in the Microsoft space – why aren’t you following his blog?) you may know that I have an interest (Chris calls it an obscure enthusiasm) in developments surrounding Excel and its various online incarnations. One aspect of this that I have always struggled with is the difference ...

The new Excel 2013 preview is publicly available and it introduces many new features, like an integrated version of PowerPivot and Power View. These two add-ins are automatically installed but not enabled by default. You just have to go in Excel Options / Add-Ins and choose COM Add-ins from the Manage combo box, then press the Go… button; at this ...

A few days ago a post about VSTO-based PowerPivot Workbook in the PowerPivot Team Blog shown a workaround for the lack of PowerPivot API in Excel. In reality, I don’t like this workaround at all, because it relies on displaying message boxes to the end user in order to click “Update” button in the PowerPivot Ribbon. I understand the reasons why ...