C H A P T E R  11

Tips, Tricks, and Traps

Truth is what stands the test of experience.

—Albert Einstein

This chapter will be a departure from the organization of the previous chapters. The intent of this chapter is to organize a collection of experiences into a reference for some PowerPivot situations that don't necessarily apply to every solution developer. For example, you may have the occasional failure of the PowerPivot add-in for Excel. This chapter incorporates a set of tasks to troubleshoot the add-in, getting your PowerPivot for Excel environment back to work.

Also included is information on dealing with the quirks, nuances, dare we say features of PowerPivot that you may find. Finally there are some techniques for tuning your PowerPivot for Excel solutions. You'll learn about slicer overload to increase worksheet performance. You will also learn to trace the Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) query language by which PowerPivot makes requests to the in-memory database engine.