A few months ago I built a set of SSAS cubes to be accessed via Excel 2007 for our team. Excel was then preferred as a front-end because business users were already familiar with excel and with the pivot table interface.
But now complaints have risen about the interface being too 'basic' and not user-friendly enough - specifically people would like to see hover-over tool-tips (or something similar) when they hover over fields in the pivot table, that will be able to give them a bit more information.
A custom .NET front-end solution would probably be ideal, but a) I don't have that level of .NET skills, and b) I don't have too much time left on this project to build something from scratch and roll it out.
Would like to hear from people here about any off-the-shelf suggestions for alternatives, that an SSAS cube can be plugged into. Thanks.
PowerPivot is the right choice for you as it has all the dimension selection options and on the fly calculated members and calculated measures features inbuilt but the solution only works with office 2010 onwards
Related
Building a BI system (dashboards) in Excel using imported tables (from excel files). We're using Excel 2016 query, data model, measures using DAX expressions, resulting in more pivot tables (some of which are reloaded into data model), etc.
My question: is there "best practice" on 1) naming these data elements and 2) documenting these bits to have a more complete system documentation.
Background: I'm the senior "hacker" munging these things together. But I need to move this towards being sustainable. I did some prototyping work and when I went back a week later it was challenging to reconstruct my thoughts and relationships...
I've seen folks refer to use of PowerBI flow diagrams to support documentation; but it seems to be more of the "icing on the cake" than the "cake" itself.
So what "bread and butter" documentation approaches have you, more experienced developers, taken to ensure that your systems are clearly documented so that others can pick up where you left off???
For naming, I follow the Kimball Group's advice for data warehouses/marts, e.g.
https://www.kimballgroup.com/2014/07/design-tip-168-whats-name/
I rename many/most Query steps to reference the column or table name, e.g. Added Custom => Added Customer Name, Append Queries => Append Customers. The idea is to be able to pick the right step first time when coming back for maintenance.
You can select all the Queries in the Query Editor window and copy their code, then paste it into Word etc as the starting point for your documentation. You can also screen-shot the Query Editor's Query Dependancies pop-up.
For the Power Pivot logic, try this solution:
https://powerpivotpro.com/2014/03/automatically-create-data-dictionary-for-your-power-pivot-model/
Is there a way to get a Microsoft Power BI Designer data model into Excel to work with in Powerpivot?
From my understanding, Power BI Designer files are not compatible with Excel.
Please see the following link:http://blogs.technet.com/b/powerbisupport/archive/2014/12/19/power-bi-designer-preview.aspx
We also cannot cross between Excel and the Power BI Designer. For
example, if we have a Data Model in Excel, I can't use that and create
reports within the Power BI Designer. Also, if I have a Data Model in
Power BI Designer, I can point Excel to use that. You have to pick one
or the other.
This is not possible. Suggest that you post a suggestion at support.PowerBI.com.
Currently it is not possible, but they are exploring a few options. You can vote there, if you think that is your need. These do not talk about using the data from PowerBI Designer files to Excel, but at least you can export/import charts.
https://support.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi/suggestions/6708045-power-point-integration
https://support.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi/suggestions/6708045-power-point-integration
As pointed out earlier by #PowerDAX you need to pick one or the other. Besides this, all data sources that you have for Power BI Designer are also available for Excel.
I have an Excel report showing a pivot table pulling data from a Data Model on Sharepoint.
I need to filter the report by each "manager" in the company(10 managers in total), so that every manager sees it's own report with it's own data.
Because reports are sharepoint integrated, i cannot play with macros.
What solution would you use to solve this problem?
My idea so far is to create a manager slicer, select manager, hide slicer and save excel. For a total of 10 excel reports. Not sure if that's a decent way tho.
I would also like to avoid creating 10 data models.
Any idea is welcome, thanks.
gg.nz,
I would opt out for using PowerView for creating easy-to-use dashboards. That will allow you to easily manage users as well. Creating 10 duplicated Excel files can be quite time-consuming and updating them manually would be not a smart way to go since you have SharePoint & Office 2013 functionality available.
See this post with detailed instructions how to use PowerView dashboards.
I am attempting to recreate a CrossTab report in CrystalReports for VS2012 that was originally done using SSRS / ReportDesigner.
What I cannot figure out how to do is enable expand/collapse interactivity for the groupings at column or row level.
This type of behavior seems to be a fairly standard part of this type of report (other tools I am comparing all seem to have this behavior available).
How / where do I enable this behavior in my report definition in CrystalReports?
As far as I know you cannot do this. Crystal reports provides very limited dynamic features. It is designed with the idea to print the report.
You can emulate similar behavior by placing 2 crosstabs in 2 on demand subreports ( one for expanded, one for collapsed crosstab) However this looks like too much work to me and will require 2 calls to the database. If you already have the report in SSRS why would you convert it to Crystal ?
There are some other options to handle this: Check the first 3 minutes of this video:http://www.r-tag.com/Pages/Preview_Demo.aspx
It demonstrates the same data presented in SSRS matrix, Crystal crosstab and SQL Pivot table. The pivot table will allow your users to have expand/collapse functionality without reporting server available.
Crystal Reports' cross-tab objects don't support expanding or collapsing. Nor do they support drill-down functionality.
I want to be able to run a workflow from right out of Dynamics that will "mail merge" into excel and attach the result into email. Something like an excel version of automerge would be amazing.
We have set templates the data would need to be pushed to, for sending onto various companies for engineer bookings.
Any ideas the easiest way of doing this?
You can do that the quick way by exporting data (there's a button on the ribbon for that). However, it's more nice if you design a function that produces a CSV-file containing what you need. The optimal design depends on the exact requirements of your task.