Our new book about PowerPivot 2013 is finally available in printed edition, too! The title is Microsoft Excel 2013: Building Data Models with PowerPivot and it is a partial rewriting of the previous book about PowerPivot for Excel 2010. In the previous book we had a target audience that included advanced Excel users and BI developers, because at ...

This year is going to end, Maya failed their predictions and while this is bad for predictive industry, it’s also good for all of us! We’ve seen many news in Microsoft BI stack: Excel 2013 has been RTM’d – its General Availability is expected in early 2013 but many early adopters are already using it daily (myself included) PowerPivot and ...

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 ...

Today at PASS Summit 2012 there have been several announcements during the keynote. Moreover, other news have not been highlighted in the keynote but are equally if not more important for the BI community. Let’s start from the big news in the keynote (other details on SQL Server Blog): Hekaton: this is the codename for in-memory OLTP ...

  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 ...

Many people are looking for books about Analysis Services Tabular. Today there are two books available and they complement each other: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model by Marco Russo, Alberto Ferrari and Chris Webb Applied Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: Tabular Modeling by Teo Lachev The ...

If you are looking to create many-to-many relationships based models in PowerPivot and in BISM Tabular, probably one day you will be interested in using them with Power View (formerly codename “Crescent”). There is a very bad news for you: it appears that, at least in its first release, Power View will not support this scenario, showing a behavior ...