I have been really impressed with Microsoft Data Explorer the minute I had a chance to play with it as I was able to turn formatted Excel reports into legitimate data sources available for analysis. Fairly recently, an update to the tool delivered an uber critical feature that makes a huge impact on the world … Continue reading Unpivot data using Microsoft Data Explorer
Tag: Microsoft Office
How to think strategic about Business Intelligence
Many people reach out to me asking for advice in helping them evaluate various BI platforms for their companies. In my mind I am obviously the wrong guy to ask as I am not shy to admit my fairly heavy bias towards Microsoft. However, over the course of the last twenty years, I have been exposed … Continue reading How to think strategic about Business Intelligence
PowerView Feature Comparisons
PowerView experience will be delivered across several Microsoft products: Excel (fat client) Excel Services (SharePoint) SharePoint – SQL Edition Office 365 PowerPoint I get a lot of questions as to what features are supported across all these deployment scenarios. Luckily Microsoft shared a slide that I will attempt to reproduce here that explains what features … Continue reading PowerView Feature Comparisons
No material differences with respect to BI found between the RTM and Preview versions of Microsoft Office 2013
Having gone through the RTM version of Microsoft Office 2013 RTM I cannot find any material differences from the Preview version. The two major (although not really feature related) differences are speed and stability (both revised significantly upwards).
How to connect Excel PowerView to Analysis Services cube
There are several UI gotchas related to building PowerView visualizations that I wanted to address with this post. First, PowerView is not available in the Ribbon out of the box, in order to enable it, one needs to go to File->Options->Add-ins. Then find Manage Add-Ins drop down box, select "COM Ad-ins" and click Go. That … Continue reading How to connect Excel PowerView to Analysis Services cube
PowerView in Excel 2013
I have been playing around with the newly released Office 2013. I cannot seem to find that many tangible Business Intelligence features in it, other than the PowerView feature that is now available in Excel. This feature has been flaky at best; I am getting all kinds of errors trying to build some visualizations against … Continue reading PowerView in Excel 2013
How to get SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013
It seems like the demand for the two products is simply insane, lots of links do not work. I have found a couple of links that have been pretty reliable for me so I will share them here: Download SharePoint 2013 here Download Office 2013 (aka Office 365 Preview) here Download Project Professional 2013 here … Continue reading How to get SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013
Office 15 unveiled by Steve Ballmer… Available for preview…
Steve Ballmer just unveiled the new version of Microsoft office available for preview here.. The two most salient points of his presentation are touch support and windows 8 integration. The new version of office appears a lot friendlier for content creation on a tablet. SkyDrive also becomes a more prominent feature that allows content creation … Continue reading Office 15 unveiled by Steve Ballmer… Available for preview…
Bubble Charts in Excel and Excel Services
Creating Bubble Charts is one of the biggest challenges in Excel and Excel Services with respect to data visualization. Microsoft made it very intuitive in PowerView and very not intuitive in Excel. Frankly, the way this functionality is implemented in Excel makes it practically unusable. Rumor has it that this area is getting a lot … Continue reading Bubble Charts in Excel and Excel Services
Improving performance of Excel reports against Analysis Services
I will start this post with a bit of a rant. There are two types of people in the Business Intelligence world: Those who do not like Excel Those who do Most of the right-click-hating low tech users belong to the first category (they are also usually the same people who like bubble gum and … Continue reading Improving performance of Excel reports against Analysis Services
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