March 3rd, 2023 in Blog, ExcelYes, even at Purple Frog Systems we use Excel! Excel is great for that quick and dirty analysis, but there is nothing worse than opening a CSV file directly with Excel and finding out you’ve lost all of your leading zeros. Take a look at my Sales.csv file Viewed as a CSV in Notepad++ it looks as it should… However viewed directly using Excel… It now looks like I’ve got a sales quantity of 62 for product id 5! To solve…
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May 31st, 2022 in Blog, Machine Learning, UncategorizedIt has come back to my turn to write a blog post, and if you remember my previous one concerned why you should use Azure based AutoMl and subsequently how to do so. If you followed that then you will be left with a model of which you’ve scored and know the performance of, but no way of how to then deploy and use your model. I will outline the steps needed to do this (which involves a major shortcut as we are using an AutoMl model), and…
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June 7th, 2015 in Blog, OtherI’ve had a problem with Excel 2013 crashing a number of times when opening/editing spreadsheets with macros. When I click ‘Enable Content’ to enable macros, the Excel window fades out, goes unresponsive and then crashes with a glorious “Microsoft Excel has stopped working, Windows is checking for a solution to the problem” message. Unfortunately Windows never seems to be able to find the elusive solution that we…
» Read moreWhilst investigating a slow set of Excel pivot tables (connected to a multidimensional SSAS cube), I found some odd behaviour in how Excel generates its MDX, sometimes doing far more work than if required and causing significant performance reduction. Take the following example, just querying Customer Count by Promotion, against the AdventureWorks cube. The profile trace (just using “Query Begin”, “Query End” and…
» Read moreA nice little nugget today for anyone who uses SQL dbmail to send data in csv attachments. Sometimes, depending on your language settings, CSV files don’t open correctly in Excel. Excel ignores the ‘,’ and puts all data in column A. You then have to go through the hassle of closing the file and opening it throug the flat file wizard. There’s a very nice solution to this that I found in this thread. It’s to…
» Read moreOne of the great features of using Excel to browse an SSAS OLAP cube is the drillthrough ability. If you double click on any cell of an OLAP pivot table, Excel will create a new worksheet containing the top 1000 fact records that went to make up the figure in the selected cell. N.B. The limit of 1000 rows can be altered, as per one of my previous blog posts here. This feature is pretty well known, but not many folk realise how easy it is to…
» Read moreWhen browsing a cube using Excel 2007, you can drillthrough the measures to display up to 1000 rows of the transaction level source data. I often get asked whether this limit of 1000 rows is configurable – well the good news is yes it is. There is an option in the actions tab of the BIDS cube designer which allows you to specify the maximum rows, but helpfully this is ignored by Excel. Instead, you have to set it in Excel when you create a…
» Read moreI was working on a new SSAS 2008 cube today, and came across an error which Google was unable to help with. I thought I’d post the solution here to help anyone else who may encounter it. The cube in question will be primarily be accessed using Excel 2007, so I’d been dutifully testing it along the way to ensure all was well. And then, after a number of changes the following error appeared when connecting to the cube from Excel to…
» Read moreHave you ever tried to reverse engineer an Excel pivot table? It’s not as easy as you would think! Whether you just want to find out the datasource details, or identify the query that was used, there is just no simple way of getting Excel to tell you. The macro below will loop through every sheet in a workbook, and will document the datasources, SQL or MDX queries as well as the page, row, column and data fields. To use it, add it into…
» Read moreFor any users of Analysis Services, if you haven’t already downloaded the Excel (2002/2003) addin you’re missing out. It’s a free download from Microsoft which significantly expands Excel’s cube querying ability. Well recommended! Get it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DAE82128-9F21-475D-88A4-4B6E6C069FF0&displaylang=en [Update 31 Aug 2023: Microsoft have now removed this download –…
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