For the next week and a half, I am going to be on the road visiting customers, so I probably will not be posting new content to the Excel 12 blog (I will try and reply to comments that show up). I will definitely pick up again after the travel is done, as there is still a lot more new in Excel 12 that we have not yet covered.

This is going to be the last PivotTable post, at least for a while. Unlike the last several posts, the subject matter that follows applies to any PivotTable, not just those connected to SQL Server Analysis Services. In current versions of Excel, one of the capabilities that exist in PivotTables is the ability to adjust the position of the labels that describe the values in the Values region of the PivotTable (i.e. “Sum of Sales”). Excel PivotTables offer significant flexibility in this area – the...

In a previous post I covered the new sorting and filtering capabilities of Excel 12 PivotTables . Those features are available for any PivotTable, regardless of the data source. There are a few additional filtering options available for PivotTables connected to Analysis Services, so I want to review those today. I also wanted to make a short point about some “formatting persistence” work we have done in Excel 12. Filtering by member properties A few days ago I wrote about member properties . When...

Today, I will cover three additional features of Analysis Services that Excel 12 PivotTables supprt – Key Performance Indicators, Actions, and Named Sets. Key Performance Indicators SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 introduced the notion of key performance indicators (KPIs). A KPI is a set of calculations defined in an Analysis Services model that represent key business metrics which can be displayed in reports, portals, dashboards, etc. There is a lot of literature out there on KPIs, so I will not...

In this post I’ll walk you through three Analysis Services features that we now support in Excel PivotTables – server formatting, translations, and member properties. One thing to keep in mind as you read is that since all these are defined in Analysis Services (i.e. on a server), every PivotTable created that pulls data from Analysis Services will get the benefit of these features without the PivotTable author or user needing to do anything. Server formatting When designing a model in Analysis Services...

In the past few months, I have written a couple of articles ( big grid , multi-threaded calculation ) that prompted comments and questions along the lines of “what about XLLs?” Since the email questions have actually been picking up in frequency (I guess a lot of readers are also XLL authors), I thought I would write a quick article that outlines the changes we are making in this area to support new functionality. Stepping back for a minute, let me briefly explain XLLs. An XLL is a DLL that is written...