Are you looking around for some decent test data for your BI demos? Well, if so, Microsoft have provided some data about all medals won at the Olympics Games (1900 to 2008) at OlympicsData workbook - Excel, SSIS, Azure sample; it provides analysis over athletes, countries, medal type, sport, discipline and various other dimensions. The data has ...

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 ...

Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal ...