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Client: What happens if I install the wrong ‘bitness’?

Recently ran into this situation: Customer installed the wrong PowerPivot bits on their machine. They were running on a 64-bit OS with Office 2010 x64, but installed PowerPivot for Excel 32-bit. Everything installed OK, but when they clicked on the PowerPivot tab in Excel; then the PowerPivot Window they received the following error:

Embedded Analysis Services [...]

Interested in PowerPivot and data mining?

I just had a chance to view some very cool demos on the topic of using PowerPivot and data mining together to solve some interesting business problems.

Go see Mark Tabladillo’s YouTube home page: http://www.youtube.com/user/MarkTabNet# or his web site at: http://www.marktab.net/ (which also has a download of the workbooks he is using in his demo.

And the [...]

Howto: Hide a table in the PowerPivot field list

Here is a cute trick for all of you ‘client’ jockeys out there. Sometimes you have a table that you, as a designer, have for some limited uses. Maybe the table exists for establishing relationships, or for intermediate calculations, but not for querying. How can you hide it? Well, it turns out that it is [...]

PowerPivot for Excel add-in is not coming up in Excel

After installing the PowerPivot for Excel add-in there are various things that you can to do attempt to debug the situation:

First, and I know this sounds dumb, but I have to point it out – you have to be using Excel 2010. PowerPivot does not run under earlier version of Excel.
Next ensure that you [...]

PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is now available as a download

For those who would looking for specific downloads of the PowerPivot for Excel 2010 RTM bits , here they are:

Important : If you install the 32-bit version of Excel 2010, you must use the 32-bit version of PowerPivot. If you install the 64-bit version of Excel 2010, you must use the 64-bit version of PowerPivot.

PowerPivot [...]

Howto: Get more flexibility when importing data from text files

Question: By default PowerPivot has two limitations when working with text files (using the Office ACE OLE DB provider): (1) will only import data from files with an extension of .txt, .tab, and .csv; and (2) it will only recognize tab, comma, semicolon, space, colon, and vertical bar and column delimiters. Is there a way [...]

Querying data within the PowerPivot Excel client add-in

Recently we have been seeing some users complain about how the PowerPivot Excel client add-in deals with queries. There are three limitations that you need deal with when working with SQL (TSQL, PL/SQL, or whatever) and stored procedures:

The result set must have a name associated with each column. If you are not returning the column [...]

Fix for PowerPivot for Excel 2010 November CTP released

And update (April 7, 2010 14:19 PST) – fix has been released!

See: http://blogs.msdn.com/powerpivot/archive/2010/04/07/fix-for-powerpivot-expiration-released.aspx

PowerPivot for Excel 2010 November CTP Expired

If you are running CTP3 PowerPivot for Excel client bits you have likely ran into our time bomb issue.

From: http://blogs.msdn.com/powerpivot/archive/2010/04/02/powerpivot-for-excel-2010-november-ctp-expired.aspx

If you are running the November 2009 CTP version of the PowerPivot for Excel 2010 add-in, your add-in expired on April 1st. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

The SQL Server team will [...]

64-bit verses 32-bit . . . What’s right for you?

Recently we been hit with a rash of inquiries around whether folks should install the 32-bit version of the PowerPivot client, or go with the larger capacity 64-bit version. Office 2010 is the first version of Office to offer a native 64-bit option. In previous releases, you had to install the 32-bit version to run [...]