November Technology Preview of PowerPivot is here!

If you thought everything in the August Technology Preview was great (for a reminder of what was there see the Overview of Gemini Features posting from August) please take a look at what will be offered in the November Preview.

What's New in PowerPivot in SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP

PowerPivot for Excel

PowerPivot Field List enhancements

Numerous enhancements were added to the Gemini field list. These include:

· Automatic detection of relationships when columns from unrelated tables are used in a PivotTable.

· Support for searching fields by name

· Support for named sets

PowerPivot Data Source editing

· Support for refreshing data for table, for all tables from a data source, or for all the tables Gemini.

· Support for editing data source information such as server name, database name and credentials.

· Support for editing table settings such as data source table or query used, columns imported and filters.

Support for more types of Data Sources

This CTP introduces targeted support for importing data from:

· Microsoft Access

· Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services

· PowerPivot workbooks published to Analysis Services running in SharePoint Integrated    Mode

· Text files

· Excel workbooks

· Microsoft SQL Azure

· Oracle

· Teradata

· Sybase

· Informix

· DB2

Enhanced Data Analysis eXpressions (DAX)

This CTP significantly expands the DAX functionality previous available:

· User interface enhancements include better propagation of errors and easier creation of DAX formulas.

· Several functions were added, including a set of functions that operate on textual data as well as those that provide common Date and Time manipulations.

· Several performance and functional capabilities were introduced including automatic recalculation

· Introduction of support for handling referential integrity violations between related tables

· Automatic selection of data types for expressions.

PowerPivot for SharePoint

Management Dashboard

This CTP introduces a management dashboard for IT. This dashboard provides visibility into PowerPivot usage on a SharePoint farm that includes information about the following areas, as well as a rich PowerPivot workbook that can be used to build custom reports:

· Published PowerPivot workbooks, including number of queries executed, number of users and size per workbook

· Hardware resource utilization for the PowerPivot service including CPU and memory

· Data refresh activity

Enhanced Infrastructure

· Claims-aware support to enable users identity to flow between SharePoint components in a secure manner

· Parallelized refresh of PowerPivot data

· Performance optimizations

 

Get the PowerPivot November Technology Preview now at https://powerpivot.com/download.aspx

For instructions on installing PowerPivot for SharePoint go here.

Additional questions or need help? Try our public forums for PowerPivot for Excel or PowerPivot for SharePoint.