Interesting Products I Saw At PASS

For my last post from the PASS Summit, I thought I’d mention briefly some of the products that caught my eye as I wandered round the exhibition hall this afternoon:

• OData Connectors from RSSBus (http://www.rssbus.com/odata/), a series of web apps that expose OData feeds (which then of course can be consumed in PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular) from a variety of data sources including Quickbooks, Twitter and MS CRM. I’d seen the website a month or so ago, actually, but I found out today they are close to releasing OData connectors for Google, Google Docs, Facebook, Email and PowerShell as well, which open up some intriguing possibilities for PowerPivot analysis. I can imagine doing a really cool demo where I set up an email address, got the audience to email me, then hooked PowerPivot up to my inbox and analysed the emails as they came in!
• XLCubed (http://www.xlcubed.com/) – well, ok, they aren’t exactly new to me but it was good to have a chat with the guys on the stand. It’s worth pointing out they have a good mobile BI story for SSAS users.
• Kepion (http://www.kepion.com/) – I was quite impressed with the demos I saw of their products for building SSAS-based BI solutions, especially for (but not restricted to) financial planning; it looked pretty slick. 
• Predixion (http://www.predixionsoftware.com/predixion/) – again, the company itself isn’t new to me but I got a demo of their new product, Predixion Enterprise Insight Developer Edition, which I’d been meaning to check out for a while. This is an immensely powerful free tool for doing data mining in Excel and it’s very closely integrated with PowerPivot too. Even if you don’t want to do complex stuff, it has some features that would be useful for regular PowerPivot users such as the ability to select a column in a PowerPivot table, analyse the data in it and then generate bandings which are then persisted in a new calculated column.

Introduction to MDX for PowerPivot Users, Part 4: Filtering

The combination of the filtering functionality built into PivotTables, and the ability to delete and reorder tuples in a set without needing to edit the set expression itself that the Excel named set functionality gives you, means that you can usually implement the filters you need in PowerPivot without needing to resort to MDX. However there are some scenarios where knowing the MDX functions that allow you to filter a set are useful and in this post I’ll show a few of them.

FILTER()

The Filter() function is the Swiss-Army penknife of filtering in MDX: it can do pretty much anything you want, but isn’t always the most elegant method. It’s quite simple in that it takes two parameters, the set that is to be filtered and a boolean expression that is evaluated for every item in the set and which determines whether that item passes through the filter or not.

Here’s a simple example. Consider a simple PivotTable (using my example model, described here) with FullDateAlternateKey on rows and the Sum of SalesAmount measure on columns:

The set of members on the FullDateAlternateKey level of the FullDateAlternateKey hierarchy can be obtained by using the .Members() function as I showed earlier in this series:
[DimDate].[FullDateAlternateKey].[FullDateAlternateKey].MEMBERS

This set can then be filtered by passing it to the Filter function, which itself returns a set, so it too can be used to create a named set. Let’s say we only wanted the set of dates where Sum of SalesAmount was greater than £10000; we could get it using the following expression:

Filter(
[DimDate].[FullDateAlternateKey].[FullDateAlternateKey].MEMBERS
, ([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount])>10000)

What I’m doing is passing the set of all dates into the first parameter of Filter() and then, in the second parameter, testing to see if the value of the tuple ([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount]) is greater than 10000 for each item in that set.

Here’s the result:

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s very important that you remember to check the ‘Recalculate set with every update’ button if you want the filter to be re-evaluated every time you change a slicer, which you almost always want to do.

Where is the filter function actually useful though? Here’s the same PivotTable but with Color on columns and with only Red and Black showing:

It’s not possible to filter this PivotTable to show only the dates where sales for Black products are greater than Sales of Red products using native functionality, but it is using MDX. Here’s the set expression:

Filter(
[DimDate].[FullDateAlternateKey].[FullDateAlternateKey].MEMBERS
, ([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Black])
>
([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Red])
)

Here I’m doing something similar to what I did in the first example, but now comparing two tuple values for each date: the tuple that returns the value of Sum of SalesAmount for Black products, which is
([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Black])
and the tuple that returns the value of Sum of SalesAmount for Red products, which is
([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Red])

NONEMPTY()

The NonEmpty() function also does filtering, but it’s much more specialised than the Filter() function – it filters items from a set that have empty values for one or more tuples. As with the Filter() function its first parameter is the set to be filtered, but its second parameter is another set, each of whose items are evaluated for each item in the first set. If one item in the second set evaluates to a non empty value for an item in the first set then that item passes through the filter.

That explanation is, I know, quite hard to digest so let’s look at an example. Here’s our PivotTable with no filter applied on rows and all Colors displayed on columns:

If you wanted to see only the rows where there were sales for Black products, you could use the following expression:

NonEmpty(
[DimDate].[FullDateAlternateKey].[FullDateAlternateKey].MEMBERS
, {([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Black])})

If you wanted to see only the rows where there were sales for Black OR Silver products, you could use this expression:

NonEmpty(
[DimDate].[FullDateAlternateKey].[FullDateAlternateKey].MEMBERS
, {([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Black])
,([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Silver])})

If you wanted to see only the rows where there were sales for Black AND Silver products you’d need to use two, nested NonEmpty functions:

NonEmpty(
NonEmpty(
[DimDate].[FullDateAlternateKey].[FullDateAlternateKey].MEMBERS
, {([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Black])})
, {([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Silver])})

TOPCOUNT(), BOTTOMCOUNT(), TOPPERCENT(), BOTTOMPERCENT()

The TopCount() and related functions are, as you’ve probably guessed from their names, useful for doing top N style filters. If you wanted to see the top 10 dates for sales of Black products you could use the following expression:

TopCount(
[DimDate].[FullDateAlternateKey].[FullDateAlternateKey].MEMBERS
, 10
, ([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Black])
)

Notice here how the dates are displayed in descending order for the Black column, but no other – that’s how you can tell that the TopCount() function is doing what you want.

To get the top N dates that provide at least 5% of the total sales across all time for Black products, you can use the following expression:

TopPercent(
[DimDate].[FullDateAlternateKey].[FullDateAlternateKey].MEMBERS
, 5
, ([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Black])
)

The BottomCount() and BottomPercent() function (I’m always reminded of one of the old, old jokes here when I use the BottomCount() function…) do the opposite and return the bottom items in a set, but you need to be careful using them because the bottom items in a set often have no values at all which is not very useful. So, for example, if you wanted to find the bottom 10 dates that have sales for Black products you need to use the NonEmpty() function as well as the BottomCount() function as follows:

BottomCount(
NonEmpty(
[DimDate].[FullDateAlternateKey].[FullDateAlternateKey].MEMBERS
, {([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Black])})
, 10
, ([Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount], [DimProduct].[Color].&[Black])
)

Here I’m taking the set of all members on the FullDateAlternateKey level of the FullDateAlternateKey hierarchy, passing that to the NonEmpty() function to return only the dates that have values for Black products and Sum of SalesAmount, and then getting the bottom 10 of those dates.

In part 5, I take a look at running MDX queries against a PowerPivot model.

Returning Selected Items in an Excel Slicer Using MDX in PowerPivot and SSAS

One problem I came up against recently is how to find out what has been selected on an Excel slicer connected to SSAS or a PowerPivot model. There are a number of blog posts showing solutions to this problem, both for scenarios where only one item has been selected and when multiple items have been selected, for example (look at the comments as well as the posts themselves):
http://www.powerpivotpro.com/2010/12/another-way-to-get-and-use-slicer-values-in-formulas/
http://www.powerpivotpro.com/2011/09/catching-multiple-slicer-selections-in-a-formula/

…but I’ve come up with a new, MDX-based approach that handles the multiple selection scenario no matter how many items there are in the slicer, and which I thought was worth blogging about. I was tempted to include this in my series on MDX for PowerPivot but since it’s equally relevant for SSAS users, and the MDX is a bit complicated for an introductory series, I thought I’d make it into a standalone post.

To describe this technique I’m going to use same PowerPivot model I describe here, which is based on the AdventureWorks DW sample database. First of all, create a new PivotTable with CalendarYear in a slicer and CalendarYear on rows and any relevant measure on columns:

Selecting a Year in the slicer means that that Year appears on rows in the PivotTable, and selecting multiple years means multiple rows are displayed, as you would expect. Next you need to add a new MDX calculated measure to the PivotTable. If you’re using SSAS you can simply add the calculation onto your cube or you can use the OLAP PivotTable Extensions addin; for PowerPivot users the OLAP PivotTable Extensions approach is the only option, so that’s what I’ll demonstrate. Right-click inside the PivotTable and choose OLAP PivotTable Extensions from the right-click menu, and then in the Calculations tab create a new calculation called SelectedYears with the following definition:

Generate(
Except(
  Axis(1)
  , {[DimDate].[CalendarYear].Defaultmember}
)
, [DimDate].[CalendarYear].Currentmember.Name
, ", "
)

…and click Add to PivotTable. The result will be a new measure that returns a comma-delimited list of the names of everything selected on the rows axis of the query, and therefore everything selected in the slicer:

How does this work? Well, first of all Axis(1) is used to return the set used on the rows axis of the query used to populate the PivotTable (incidentally, this is why it’s important to have another measure in the PivotTable – if it’s not there, the structure of the query generated by Excel will be different and while the MDX can be altered to handle this, some of the items in the slicer will be partially greyed-out). The set returned by Axis(1) will include the All Member of the CalendarYear hierarchy, so the Except() function is used to remove it; finally, the Generate() function is used to iterate over this set and return the comma-delimited list of member names. In this example the CalendarYear field on the DimDate table in my PowerPivot model has become the MDX hierarchy with the unique name [DimDate].[CalendarYear]; please read this post for some background on how PowerPivot objects map to MDX objects.

Now you have the PivotTable you can refer to the top-right cell in it (in this example it’s cell F3)  in it to return the list of years and hide the PivotTable itself; this allows you to create dynamic titles like the following:

="Sales For Years: " & F3

You can then also create other, new PivotTables and hook them up to the original slicer and they will all work as normal:

 

Introduction to MDX for PowerPivot Users, Part 3: The Members() and Crossjoin() functions

In the previous post in this series I looked at how MDX set expressions could be used inside Excel to give you total control over what appears on the rows and columns axis of your PowerPivot PivotTables. However, I only showed how to construct basic MDX set expressions using members and tuples; in this post I’ll show you how to use two of the commonest MDX set functions: Members() and Crossjoin().

MEMBERS()

The Members() function returns the set of members from either an entire hierarchy or a single level from that hierarchy. I’d say it is by far the most widely-used of all MDX functions, even if a lot of the time people don’t realise they are using it (see here for why that is). As far as PowerPivot goes it’s not all that useful on its own – if you want to see all the members on a level or a hierarchy, it’s easy to do that without using named sets – but it is frequently used in conjunction with other set functions. Some examples:
[DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].MEMBERS
…returns the set of all members on the EnglishDayNameOfWeek hierarchy, whose unique name is [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek]. Remember that in PowerPivot, as I said in the first post in this series, a column in a table becomes a hierarchy in MDX and a hierarchy in PowerPivot also becomes a hierarchy in MDX; also that this expression will also return the All Member from the hierarchy, which means that this expression will return a Grand Total row:

Compare this with the results returned by the expression:
[DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].MEMBERS
Here I’m using the Members() function with the unique name of the EnglishDayNameOfWeek level on the EnglishDayNameOfWeek hierarchy, whose unique name is [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek]. I don’t want to go into too much detail about how this is different from the previous expression; for a PowerPivot user the thing to note is that the All Member is now not returned in the set, and there is no Grand Total row returned:

CROSSJOIN()

The Crossjoin() function takes two or more sets and returns a set of tuples representing all possible combinations of items in these sets. So, for example, the crossjoin of the two sets {A, B} and {X, Y} is the set of tuples {(A,X), (A,Y), (B,X), (B,Y)}. There are in fact several ways to write a crossjoin in MDX as I showed in this post, and I prefer to use the * operator over the Crossjoin() function because it’s less verbose. Here’s an example of two set expressions that return the same result using the Crossjoin() function and the * operator:

[DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].MEMBERS
*
[DimProductCategory].[EnglishProductCategoryName].[EnglishProductCategoryName].MEMBERS

…and…

CROSSJOIN(
[DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].MEMBERS
,
[DimProductCategory].[EnglishProductCategoryName].[EnglishProductCategoryName].MEMBERS
)

…and here’s the output:

Using Members() And Crossjoin() To Optimize PivotTables With Many Hierarchies On Rows And Columns

In this series I want to balance out each dose of theory with some useful practical tips, and here’s the first practical tip: when you have a PivotTable with many hierarchies on rows or columns, you may find that it takes a long time to refresh and that using a named set instead may help improve performance. This is because of a design flaw in the way Excel generates the MDX for PivotTables which means that even when you opt not to display subtotals and grand totals, Excel still requests some of them in the queries it runs against your PowerPivot model. This issue has been blogged about in detail several times by Rui Quintino, Richard Lees and me:
http://rquintino.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/excel-20072010-pivot-tables-getting-detailedgranular-table-reports-from-olap-in-seconds/
http://richardlees.blogspot.ch/2010/04/improving-excels-cube-performance.html
http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/excel-subtotals-when-querying-multidimensional-and-tabular-models/

So, for example, if you have put CalendarYear, EnglishDayNameOfWeek and EnglishProductCategoryName on rows in your PivotTable like so:

You can replace this with a named set with the following definition:

[DimDate].[CalendarYear].[CalendarYear].MEMBERS
*
[DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].MEMBERS
*
[DimProductCategory].[EnglishProductCategoryName].[EnglishProductCategoryName].MEMBERS

Here, I’m asking for the crossjoin of all the members (except the All Members) on the CalendarYear, EnglishDayNameOfWeek and EnglishProductCategoryName hierarchies and not requesting any subtotals or grand totals at all in the query. The larger the number of hierarchies on rows or columns in your PivotTable the more noticeable the improvement in performance will be when using this MDX pattern. The penalty for doing this, though, is that end users lose the ability to drill up or down or to alter the selection made without editing the MDX.

In part 4, I’ll take a closer look at how to filter sets.

Introduction to MDX for PowerPivot Users, Part 2: Basic Sets

In the first post in this series I looked at how the objects in a PowerPivot model mapped onto MDX objects; now, I’m going to start looking at some practical uses for MDX with Excel’s named sets functionality. Once you’ve created a PivotTable on top of your PowerPivot model, you can find this functionality on the PivotTable Tools/Options tab on the ribbon by clicking on the Fields, Items and Sets button:

What it does is allow you fine control over what appears on the rows and columns axes of your PivotTable. Now you don’t need to know any MDX to use this functionality to do fairly basic things like delete rows or to change the order, but with MDX you can do some pretty amazing things!

Consider the following simple PowerPivot model built from the Adventure Works DW database:

From this you can create a PivotTable with Calendar Years on rows and a measure that sums up the SalesAmount column:

With this PivotTable created, you can now go to the ribbon and you’ll see that there is the option to create a named set based on the selection you’ve made on rows:

Clicking on the Create Set Based on Row Items menu item opens the New Set dialog:

It’s here you can add, delete, copy and move rows; if you click the Edit MDX button then you can see the MDX representation of the selection you’ve made:

Here’s the actual MDX from this screenshot:

{([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005]),([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2006]),([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007]),([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008]),([DimDate].[CalendarYear].[All])}

This is an MDX set expression: a set is just an ordered list of things, and there’s no equivalent object in DAX or SQL. Sets are written as comma delimited lists of members or tuples (we’ll come to what a tuple is later!) surrounded by curly brackets or braces, ie {}. This example is a set of Calendar Years in the following order: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and a member called “All” which returns the Grand Total value. Sets can be given names – and so become named sets – and this means that anywhere MDX expects a set expression you can use the name of the set you’ve defined to return that set.

If, at this point, you click OK, a new named set called “Set1” will be created and that will be used as the selection on the rows axis of the PivotTable; since you haven’t changed any of the MDX, though, the PivotTable itself will look identical. The fact that the set is now used to control what’s on rows can be seen in the field list:

You can now go back and edit the set by clicking on the Manage Sets menu option under Fields, Items and Sets, selecting Set1 from the list of named sets and clicking Edit.

Rearranging and deleting items in the set expression in the Modify Set dialog that then appears (which looks the same as the New Set dialog above) changes the contents of the named set and so changes what is selected on the rows axis of the PivotTable. You can find the unique names of members and other objects by dragging them from the Fields, Items and Sets pane on the left hand side into the Set Definition text box on the right hand side.

It’s important, if you want the order of items in your set to be maintained (and you almost always do when writing your own MDX), that you also uncheck the Automatically Order and Remove Duplicates From the Set option at the bottom of the dialog:

For example, using the following set expression with automatic ordering turned on:

{([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007])}

Gives you the set of years 2008, 2005 and 2007 in the order 2005, 2007 and 2008 and results in a PivotTable looking like this:

With automatic ordering turned off you get the set of years 2008, 2005, 2007 in that order, which is of course the order they are listed in the set:

MDX is a language plagued with brackets and commas and it’s very easy to make syntax errors when writing it. To check that your MDX is syntactically correct you can click the Test MDX button in the Modify Set dialog.

Now let’s talk about tuples. A tuple is another MDX concept that doesn’t have an equivalent in DAX or SQL; you can think of it as a kind of co-ordinate. Tuples are written as comma delimited lists of members surrounded by round brackets, ie (). As I said before, you can have sets of members or sets of tuples (well, strictly speaking all sets are sets of tuples but I won’t go there…) and the two sets you’ve seen above are sets of tuples. So the set:

{([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007])}

…contains three tuples, and this:
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008])

…is a single tuple containing one member, the member for the year 2008 which has the unique name:
[DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008]

The set:

{[DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008],
[DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005],
[DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007]}

…is a set of three members – notice that the round brackets have disappeared – but will return the same three rows in a PivotTable as the previous set. In these two examples, each tuple or member (ie each item) in the set becomes a single row in the PivotTable.

Tuples can have more than one member in them though. Consider the following set:

{([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008], [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Monday]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005], [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Friday]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007], [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Tuesday])}

It still contains three tuples, but this time each tuple is composed of a year and a day name. Each tuple still becomes a row in the PivotTable (something which is best observed if you choose Show in Tabular Form on the PivotTable Design tab of the ribbon), but now each row has two levels of nesting, a year followed by a day name:

You can have as many members as you like in a tuple, so for example you could add some quarters too:

{([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008],
[DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Monday],
[DimDate].[CalendarQuarter].&[1]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005],
[DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Friday],
[DimDate].[CalendarQuarter].&[4]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007],
[DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Tuesday],
[DimDate].[CalendarQuarter].&[1])}

I’ll finish off this post by mentioning the two important rules that you have to remember when defining sets and tuples, namely:

• Each item in a set has to be the same type of thing. So, if you have a set of members, each member has to come from the same hierarchy; if you have a set of tuples, each tuple has to contain the same number of members and each tuple has to contain members from the same hierarchy in the same position.
• Each item in a tuple has to be a member from a different hierarchy.

For example:

This is a valid set containing three members, because each member comes from the CalendarYear hierarchy:

{[DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008],
[DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005],
[DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007]}

This is not a valid set however, because it consists of two members from the CalendarYear hierarchy and one member from the CalendarQuarter hierarchy:

{[DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008],
[DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005],
[DimDate].[CalendarQuarter].&[1]}

This is a valid tuple because it contains three members from three different hierarchies:

([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007],
[DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Tuesday],
[DimDate].[CalendarQuarter].&[1])

This is not a valid tuple because it contains two members from the CalendarYear hierarchy:

([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007],
[DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005],
[DimDate].[CalendarQuarter].&[1])

This is a valid set of tuples because each of the three tuples consists of a member from the CalendarYear hierarchy followed by a member from the EnglishDayNameOfWeek hierarchy:

{([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008], [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Monday]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005], [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Friday]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007], [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Tuesday])}

Whereas this is not a valid set of tuples, even though each tuple on its own is valid, because the final tuple in the set contains a member from the EnglishDayNameOfWeek hierarchy followed by a member from the CalendarYear hierarchy, rather than a CalendarYear followed by an EnglishDayName of week:

{([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008], [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Monday]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005], [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Friday]),
([DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Tuesday], [DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007])}

This is not a valid set of tuples either, because the final tuple (which again is valid in its own right) contains a CalendarYear followed by a CalendarQuarter:

{([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2008], [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Monday]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2005], [DimDate].[EnglishDayNameOfWeek].&[Friday]),
([DimDate].[CalendarYear].&[2007], [DimDate].[CalendarQuarter].&[1])}

Phew! I know the theory behind MDX can be very heavy going, but I promise you it’s important to learn it in order to be able to get the most out of the language. Next time, in part 3, I’ll look at some functions that returns sets and see how they can be used to construct more complex selections.

Introduction to MDX for PowerPivot Users, Part 1

This is a series of posts I’ve wanted to write for a long time. The more I use PowerPivot, the more I realise how many more cool things you can do when building your Excel reports if you know a bit of MDX. Of course it seems a bit strange to say this, because (at least if you hear Marco and Alberto present at a conference!) MDX is a bit passé and DAX is the native language of PowerPivot, SSAS Tabular and, well the future. But Excel speaks MDX and Excel will continue to speak MDX for a long time to come, so it’s MDX that you need to know if you want to get the most out of PowerPivot.

So, before I start, when is it useful to know MDX with PowerPivot? Here’s the functionality that it’s relevant for:

• The Excel cube functions, especially but by no means limited to, the CubeSet() function.
• The Create Set Based on Rows/Columns options under the Fields, Items and Sets button on the PivotTable Options tab on the ribbon
• When binding the results of an MDX query to a table in Excel, as described here
• If you ever wanted to write MDX calculations using OLAPPivotTableExtensions, though I’m struggling to think of scenarios where you’d want to do this

I’ll come back to the practical uses of MDX in future posts; the next task is to understand how the objects in a PowerPivot model map onto the multidimensional objects that MDX understands. From now on I’ll be using the MDX terminology so it might be useful to refer back to the list below if you get confused!

• A PowerPivot model is seen as a single cube in MDX; you can think of a cube and a PowerPivot model as being the thing that holds all the data, the thing you’re querying. The cube that a PowerPivot model is exposed as is called [Model].
• In PowerPivot a model is made up of multiple tables; in MDX a cube is made up of multiple dimensions. Each table in a PowerPivot model becomes a dimension in MDX.
• In PowerPivot a table is made up of multiple columns, each of which can be dragged onto the rows and columns of a PivotTable. Each of these columns becomes a hierarchy in MDX. Confusingly, hierarchies in PowerPivot also become hierarchies in MDX. Basically, anything that you can put on rows, columns, a filter or in a slicer is a hierarchy in MDX.
• Each distinct value in a column becomes a member on a hierarchy in MDX. For example, the value ‘Bikes’ from a column called EnglishProductCategoryName on a table called DimProductCategory becomes an MDX member with the name:
  [DimProductCategory].[EnglishProductCategoryName].&[Bikes]
• Each measure in a PowerPivot model becomes a member on a dimension called [Measures] (which only has one, invisible hierarchy) in MDX. For example a PowerPivot model called [Sum of SalesAmount] becomes an MDX member with the following name:
  [Measures].[Sum of SalesAmount]

In Part 2 I’ll introduce the concept of sets and how they can be used.

Access 2013 and Self-Service BI

Wait, I know what you’re thinking: Access, isn’t that dead yet? Well, no – and if you’ve been reading the blogs about Access 2013 that it’s undergone something of a transformation, one that’s very interesting from a BI point of view. The key change is mentioned here:

http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-access/archive/2012/07/20/introducing-access-2013-.aspx

One of the biggest improvements in Access 2013 is one you may not even notice—except that you’re whole app will be faster, more reliable, and work great with large amounts of data. When Access databases are published to SharePoint—whether on-premise or through Office 365—a full-fledged SQL Server database is automatically created to store the data. Advanced users who are already familiar with SQL Server will be able to directly connect to this database for advanced reporting and analysis with familiar tools such as Excel, Power View, and Crystal Reports. Everyday users can rest assured that their apps are ready for the future if they ever need to enhance them with advanced integrations or migrations.

So while Access 2013 is still a desktop database, the Access Web App is essentially a power-user-friendly tool for creating SQL Server/Azure SQL database applications. As Tim Anderson points out here (in a post that’s also worth a read) there seems to be a bit of an overlap with LightSwitch; but that’s incidental here. The real point I wanted to make is that this is another key piece in the Microsoft self-service BI stack in place. By the time users are working with Office 2013 for real, I can imagine some quite sophisticated self-service BI solutions being built where data is loaded into a SQL Server database designed in Access (maybe using Data Explorer?) before it gets to Excel/PowerPivot, a much more robust approach than loading data direct from the original source into Excel/PowerPivot. I’m sure there’ll still be plenty of opportunity for SQL Server DBAs to look down on the work of Access developers, but it looks like this will give Access a new lease of life.

Unfortunately it looks like Access 2013 Web Apps won’t support OData just yet. Here’s a comment from Todd Haugen, a program manager on the Access team, on the first blog post referenced above:

Sorry to say we did not get to enable support for OData at RTM. This is a key area we are looking at for the next release. In the near-term SQL Azure will be turning on ODBC access which will allow you to hook Excel and PowerPivot together with Access. This feature will be available by RTM.

I had hoped to be able to write up a demo of PowerPivot connecting to a database created with the Access Web App, but this comment (and my inability to get it working, even though I can see the server name and database name I’d need to connect to in Access) means you’ll just have to imagine what might be possible…

Further reading:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj250134(v=office.15)
http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-access/archive/2012/07/30/get-started-with-access-2013.aspx

Consuming OData feeds from Excel Services 2013 in PowerPivot

In yesterday’s post I showed how you could create surveys in the Excel 2013 Web App, and mentioned that I would have liked to consume the data generated by a survey via the new Excel Services OData API but couldn’t get it working. Well, after a good night’s sleep and a bit more tinkering I’ve been successful so here’s the blog post I promised!

First of all, what did I need to do to get this working? Well, enable Excel Services for a start, duh. This can be done by going to Settings, then Site Collections features, and activating Sharepoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features:

With that done, and making sure that my permissions are all in order, I can go into Excel, start the OData feed import wizard (weirdly, the PowerPivot equivalent didn’t work) and enter the URL for the table in my worksheet (called Table1, helpfully):

Here’s what the URL for the Survey worksheet I created in yesterday’s post looks like:
https://mydomain.sharepoint.com/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Shared%20Documents/SurveyTest.xlsx/OData/Table1

(there’s much more detail on how OData requests for Excel Services can be constructed here).

And bingo, the data from my survey is loaded into Excel/PowerPivot and I can query it quite happily. Nothing to it.

In a way it’s a good thing I’m writing about this as a separate post because I’m a big fan of OData and I believe that the Excel Services OData API is a big deal. It’s going to be useful for a lot more than consuming data from surveys: I can imagine it could be used for simple budgeting solutions where managers input values on a number of spreadsheets, which are then pulled together into a PowerPivot model for reporting and analysis; I can also imagine it being used for simple MDM scenarios where dimension tables are held in Excel so users can edit them easily. There are some obvious dangers with using Excel as a kind of database in this way, but there are also many advantages too, most of which I outlined in my earlier discussions of data stores that are simultaneously human readable and machine readable (see here and here). I can see it as being the glue for elaborate multi-spreadsheet-based solutions, although it’s still fairly clunky and some of the ideas I saw in Project Dirigible last year are far in advance of what Excel 2013 offers now. It’s good to see Microsoft giving us an API like this though and I’m sure we’ll see some very imaginative uses for it in the future.

Creating Surveys using Excel 2013 Forms

Jamie Thomson and I share a number of… obscure enthusiasms. For instance, last week when he spotted the new forms/surveys feature in the Excel 2013 Web App (see here for a mention) he knew I’d be excited. And I was. Excited enough to devote a whole blog post to them.

What is this feature? Basically a rip-off of homage to the Google docs functionality I mentioned here that allows you to create simple questionnaires and save the data back to a spreadsheet. To use it you need to create a new Excel spreadsheet in the Excel Web App (I can’t seem to find it in desktop Excel and it may not even exist there), then click on Form/New Form in the ribbon:

This opens a new dialog where you can create your form/survey:

It’s all pretty self-explanatory from there, you just enter a title and description and then some questions, which can be various types (returning text, numbers, multiple choices etc):

You can then answer the questions yourself or send a link out to other people so they can too:

If you’d like to take the survey you can do so here btw.

The data then lands in a table in the original Excel spreadsheet, ready for you to do something useful with it:

For my next trick, and to go back to another issue that Jamie and I have been moaning about for years, I would have liked to consume the data in this table via an OData feed as detailed here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint/jj163874(v=office.15)

Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work. Whether this is a temporary problem or a limitation with Office 365 (as opposed to on-prem Sharepoint) I don’t know… if someone knows how to make it work, though, I’d be much obliged if you could leave a comment.

UPDATE: First of all, if you can’t see the survey don’t worry – the service seems to be very unreliable. Secondly I’ve got the OData feed working now and will blog about it later.

Building a Simple BI Solution in Excel 2013, Part 2

In part 1 of this series I showed how to build a BI dashboard with UK weather data in Excel 2013. What I’m going to do now is show, very quickly, how this dashboard can be shared with other people via a web browser.

Before I do that, though, an aside: I found a bug in the preview version of Excel 2013 which means that the dashboard I built in the previous post won’t work with what I’m going to describe here. It’s related to how I imported the data – in my last post I imported data from the Azure DataMarket from the Data tab, and what I’ve had to do for this post is import data from inside the PowerPivot window instead. In a way it’s a good thing I did this because the UI for importing data from the Azure DataMarket in PowerPivot is much better than what I showed before (although it too is quite buggy at the moment). No more fumbling around for account keys and OData queries in the way that Rob Collie complains about here, it’s all handled from within the wizard. All you need to do is pick a data set:

And then check the tables you want and optionally apply filters to certain columns that support it:

Anyway, with my workbook rebuilt, the next thing I’m going to do is save it. There’s actually a lot more to saving in Office 2013 than you might expect, and certainly lots of different options for places to save stuff too, so I recommend you read this post to get a feeling of what’s possible. I’ve signed up for the Office 365 Professional Plus Preview which means I have access to all kinds of cloud-based services including Sharepoint in the cloud, so I can save my workbook up to Sharepoint:

I can then go to my Sharepoint site on another computer and view and interact with my dashboard using Office Web Apps in the browser:

Yes, that’s my Power View dashboard in a web browser – and I can change filters and it all works! Here’s my PivotTable:

I can not only drill down, but I can even change what’s on rows and columns by dragging and dropping fields in the Field list in the usual way. It’s a bit slow and (again) a bit buggy at the moment, but by RTM I can see this being a big selling point: anyone with Office 365 will have in place everything they need not only for BI on the desktop, but for sharing their reports over the web (though data refresh may be a problem here). I’m very impressed, and it’s good to see such a strong answer to the question I asked here last year.

Finally, the question I know you’re all dying to ask. Does this work on an iPad? Well, yes and no. The PivotTable works properly and there’s no loss of interactivity, although I’d say that the touch interface doesn’t work all that smoothly yet:

Unfortunately the Power View sheet doesn’t work at all – no Silverlight!

Oh well, maybe that was too much to ask for… this is clearly not the Microsoft mobile BI solution that was promised at PASS last year. That’s not to say it isn’t useful though – there’s still some good stuff you can do with PivotTables and regular Excel sheets. I’m still very happy with what’s been delivered so far!