Posts Tagged ‘Excel 2010’

PowerPivot CTP expired

Before I go on a rant I would like to point out what a joy PowerPivot is. I found it a marvellous feature of upcoming Microsoft products and the implications for the Business Intelligence community are huge. I had been using it consistently for a couple of months in my spare time, exploring its potential for my present employer after seeing it at the SQLBits V conference back in November. I had nothing but praise.

This morning I got back from my Easter break ready to do a demo to the company only to be greeted with an expiry message. This would not have annoyed me so much if:

  1. I had been informed PowerPivot will expire during the original installation.
  2. A warning was given that an expiry was looming.
  3. PowerPivot was not free.
  4. A replacement download or installation was available to keep it rolling.

On the MSDN forums the only solution appears to be disable the Windows Time service and then set your clock back before April 1st. This can cause issues in other applications though, so not viable if you are trying to perform a smooth demonstration.

Microsoft please remember to take your crazy pills. Seems a little insane to expire a FREE product, particuarly before the official release is available.

Hide your sheets

When you first install PowerPivot for Sharepoint 2010 and start deploying your workbooks it does not take long to notice that the Sharepoint library preview displays ALL the sheets in your workbooks. This looks pretty awful in what should be a slick gallery, plus the thumbnails are too small to examine data in any meaningful way. As my experience with Excel was pretty limited I naturally thought you would hide the sheets in Sharepoint – WRONG.

Open up your workbook in Excel and right click on the sheet tab and it will have a “Hide” option. Hide all the sheets you don’t want to see and save it back to Sharepoint et voila! No more pesky ugly data sheets. Only nice clean, sexy charts that will make your clients drool.

Immediately the next natural question is how do I get them back in case I have an itchy mouse finger? Right click any remaining sheet and select “Unhide”. You are presented with a list of hidden sheets to re-display.

Pretty simple stuff when you are looking in the right place.

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