Rob Collie Ken Puls (thanks Bob!) wrote a very interesting post about the PowerPivot for Excel 2013 licensing. Short recap: PowerPivot for Excel 2013 is only available in a few editions of Excel/Office (more details here) If you want to buy a perpetual license of Excel with PowerPivot, you need to be included in a Volume Licensing program ...

DAX offers a set of Time Intelligence functions that simplify writing DAX expressions such as YTD, YOY and other time-related calculations. However, these functions only works when some assumptions are valid: your periods should be “natural” months and quarter. Some industries, such as retail and manufacturing, are used to accounting periods that ...

Many people started using PowerPivot with Excel 2010. In order to start using PowerPivot for Excel 2010, you just have to download the add-in and install it for free. In Excel 2013, PowerPivot is already installed and you just have to enable it. However, you have to be careful about the Excel 2013 version you use, because not all the versions have ...

Spring is coming and we published many dates of SSAS Tabular Workshops around Europe and online. Alberto Ferrari is coming to Aarhus, Denmark, for a 2-day SSAS Tabular Workshop on March 12-13, 2013 (you can see more info and register here). And Alberto will also deliver a free session in a community event on March 12 evening: the session is ...

The Microsoft has launched the new Office 2013, we are proud to announce the availability of the new PowerPivot Workshop for Excel 2013! We have a fresh new website that offers all the training options: online and classroom courses. The target of this training are Excel Advanced Users and there are two versions of the workshop: the BASIC version ...

Kasper de Jonge wrote a blog post last year introducing an interesting new feature in Excel 2013: you can write a DAX query that extracts data from the PowerPivot model and returns a table in Excel. Such a table can be used as a Linked table for the same PowerPivot model, creating an interesting opportunity to inject data in a data model mixing ...

There are several versions of PowerPivot available and starting with Excel 2013 there are also several versions of Excel. It is useful to look at the compatibility between the different versions of Excel and PowerPivot available now. As a general rule when you have a PowerPivot workbook saved with a specific version of PowerPivot: You can ...

In the last days I needed a quick and efficient way to monitor the performance of a job and of each step over time. There’s a lot of interesting data in MSDB database and the various sysjob tables, but the stored data is not really easy to use outside the Management Studio. Date and Time are not stored as date/time data type, there is no easy way ...

Recently I had to write a DAX formula containing a LASTDATE within the logical condition of a FILTER: I found that its behavior was not the one I expected and I further investigated. At the end, I wrote my findings in this article on SQLBI, which can be applied to any Time Intelligence function with a <dates> argument. The key ...

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 ...