My Wish List for Excel 2015 - Power Pivot

This certainly isn’t a list of suggestions for Microsoft because it is much too late for that. Microsoft is likely all done coding and now we just wait for them to polish up. But hey, a man can have wishes, and here are mine. I have put them in order of how much I care… Smile

Power Pivot For All

Office 2013 was a complete fiasco for Power Pivot. Originally it was only available via volume licensing before public outcry allowed folks to buy the standalone version of Excel to get the Power Pivot hotness. If Microsoft wants to bring Business Intelligence to the masses… they better not screw this up again.

Built in Calendar support

This is probably my most embarrassing conversation with clients. “And Power Pivot has built in time intelligence functions to compute Year to Date, Same Period Last Year, etc… but um… you need a calendar table… which … uh… ummm… you have to somehow generate yourself…”

Excel 2010 UI

No… not literally. But it is completely true that the UI experience was superior in 2010. 2013 just took away every useful shortcut on the Excel window associated with Power Pivot – editing measures, inserting pivot tables, etc. If I have a choice… I always use 2010. So, I am hoping that the 2015 experience is at least as good as 2010…

Improved completion

Even once you learn the odd quirks of the code completion for Power Pivot… it will still frustrate you. You end up hitting backspace in hopes it will start completing a table name, then completing the field name only to end up with double ]] on the end, and you end up doing more fixing of the autocomplete than getting actual use of it.

Improved VBA support

2013 did add some VBA support for Power Pivot, but it is far from complete. Being able to add a measure via VBA would be fanfreakintastic.

Better refreshing and control of refreshing

As your workbook starts getting filled up with more data, measures and reports… waiting for excel to refresh starts to be a serious problem. This addin helps to some degree, but it shouldn’t really be required. There are times when Excel decides to refresh, like, after inserting a brand new calculated column… and you are thinking “Really Excel? A new blank column and you need to refresh… <sigh>”

Better support for connection changes

If you are pulling data from a CSV and decide you want to pull from SQL instead… well, good luck. You are deleting a table and I really hope you didn’t have any measures, calculated columns or relationships… because you are going to enjoy recreating those.

Better (Bulk) Copy/Paste for measures

No reason that from the Power Pivot window we can’t multi-select a bunch of measures and cut/paste them to another table (useful if you need to remove a table) or even another workbook. I wouldn’t even mind some sort of export/import feature.

Easier/better drilldown support

I have certainly seen where I can put Year, then Month, then Day fields onto a pivot chart, then collapse down to the year level… allowing a double-click to Month then another double-click to Day. It is really cool and even works on SharePoint. But I will be darned if I can figure out how to work this feature consistently. If I could… I could keep more people from using Power View Winking smile

Better Error Handling

Two different problems here. One is just that… too many totally weird freaky inexplicable errors that you just ignore and move on. The other problem is that for legitimate user errors, the messages are basically insane. I use Power Pivot every single day and could not possibly explain the meaning of some of these errors.

About Scott Senkeresty

Scott Senkeresty here… Founder and Owner of Tiny Lizard. Yes, I have done some stuff: A Master’s Degree in Computer Science from California Polytechnic State University in beautiful San Luis Obispo, California. Over twelve years developing software for Microsoft, across Office, Windows and Anti-Malware teams… Read More >>

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