If you read my blog, there is a 95% chance you also read the blog over at PowerPivotPro, but if you haven’t seen their announcement, feel free to head on over! Come back for my thoughts: http://www.powerpivotpro.com/2015/02/introducing-power-update/
There is a bunch of questions I ask new clients… about the size and nature of their data, how they get final reports out to the folks that want to see them, etc. And there is a lot of dancing around this theme of “how and when are you going to refresh your workbooks?”. If they want hourly refreshes, I make a cringy face. They want to use the DMG, but can’t get it quite working… ya, me to, sister. They hear me saying how much I loves me some Power Query, but they use on-prem SharePoint? Ugh.
There are just so many reason to refresh on the client side. First and foremost – guess what? That’s where I developed my report. That’s where I have refreshed the last 44 times, and I know it works fine. In the Power BI case, even if you can convince the DMG to work… it always feel weird to me to send the very not compressed data up to the cloud, then compress it into the Power Pivot database. I would kind of like to avoid moving so much data, ya know?
I have been one of the beta testers, and I will just jump to the end: It is awesome.
Maybe it’s a weird place to start, but the developers at Power Planner have been great – super responsive to fixing bug, great at taking my feedback and turning around a product that worked better in my scenarios.
I might live in a bubble, but… I suspect my scenario might be common: I have finished updating my database (importing data from other systems, doing any aggregation, whatever) – and now I am ready to refresh my workbooks. There is no schedule. I just want a programmatic way to kick off a refresh. And tell me if it worked. And drop me a log file.
This. Works. Awesome.
Here is the weirdest thing. I was on the phone last week with a new client. I started dancing the dance of “How do you refresh your data”. And like… I just stopped mid-sentence. It just turned into an epic I don’t care. Regardless of what the client said to me… I already knew how I was going to refresh their workbooks. I felt such… freedom! Total game changer.
Nice job dudes!
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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 >>
Power Update has made me excited about Power Pivot and Power Query again.
I’m especially excited about now being able to automatically publish analysis to OneDrive and embed it on any website. Now we finally have a very easy way to show the power of Excel without people having to open the Excel program on their desktop. They can consume up-to-date analysis by simply clicking a hyperlink.