PowerPivotGeek?

Who is this mystery man?
Click on the icon to find out. Who is powerpivotgeek?

Incoming emails to a PowerPivot Gallery

From time to time you run into something on SharePoint that is a known SharePoint ‘issue’, but you wouldn’t necessarily see PowerPivot being impacted. After all SharePoint is this huge juggernaut of a product and PowerPivot is just this one small little app in the corner. Well, here is one that I ran into today. [...]

Installation error: Running the wrong version of SharePoint

(Well, maybe you are – maybe you aren’t . . . How can you check directly?)

In an earlier post (http://powerpivotgeek.com/2010/03/04/installing-the-right-version-of-sharepoint/) I spoke about the way that PowerPivot determines if you are on the right version of SharePoint. Cory Retherford reported some errors and after investigating it for a few days we found the solution.

Here is [...]

Modifying the SharePoint v4.master page for the PowerPivot Gallery

Attempting to use a modified version of the SharePoint v4.master page is a great way to style our SharePoint site.  If you interested in doing this, then the first thing to do is to make sure that you go to the right place:

Go to Site Settings -> Site Collection Features -> Make sure “SharePoint Server [...]

Installation failure: “Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.AnalysisServices.SharePoint.Integration.dll’ . . .

We’ve been hearing reports of this failure for several weeks, but we’ve not been able to get a good repro until a week ago. And it was the most “most reported bug” at TechEd — if there is such a category — but it looks like we have a solution after many hours [...]

Changing service accounts and handling password resets

While this is technically a pure SharePoint posting, we have found it useful in our labs. We have password resets all of the time and this cheat sheet was developed to make it as painless as possible. I hope you find it as useful as we do.

Step 1: Start Services.msc

For each service using the machine [...]

“Unsupported features” warning message from Excel Services

(Thanks to Ankur Goyal, one of the PowerPivot mid-tier testers, for this detailed write-up)

You might have noticed that Excel Services sometimes complains about how the PowerPivot workbook is organized. It reports an warning error like this one::

In this posting, I’ll talk about why these rectangles exist (i.e. what they do) and how you can have [...]

Testing the Claims To Windows Token Service for different identities

As noted in a previous blog post on debugging “The data connection uses windows authentication and user credentials could not be delegated” there are times (very rare times) when the issue is a problem with your Active Directory configuration. I want to reiterate that this is rare and it is usually something as simple as [...]

Enabling the SharePoint Developer Dashboard

(Thanks to Ankur Goyal, one of the PowerPivot mid-tier testers)

SharePoint 2010 comes with a whole group of new developer tools. But there is none cooler than the Developer Dashboard. The Developer Dashboard allows you to monitor page load performance on SharePoint. Now how cool is that – you see how each element on the page [...]

SharePoint Timer Service error

In another one of those “oh heck, I just spent a couple hours of my life chasing my tail” and in an effort to ‘prepare everyone for RTM’, you might notice the following error pop up from time to time.

And in the NT Event Log you might seen entries like:

An unhandled exception occurred and [...]

Tip: You must use a 32-bit browser when running on a 64-bit client

This will save you a few hours of debugging. Virtually every SharePoint feature and application, e.g. Excel, PPT, and Word Web Apps, do not support 64-bit browsers. In order to work around this behavior, please use a 32-bit browser. While others have issues around compatibility, this restriction applies to PowerPivot for one HUGE reason. And [...]