Well the Gemini team is making progress towards shipping. Now they have a real name: PowerPivot . They still don’t have any pricing/licensing/packaging details; that is promised later this year. There’s also links to sign up for a beta. But I don’t have...

Finally made it out the door ! For the AddIn I have a couple notes: Besides the usual rollup of hotfixes (bug fixes) there is a new feature: Line Item Details (LIDs). This was supported by the server but not on the client side, and now it is! We did our...

Although the model of using an Excel AddIn can be a little clunky (especially for what PPS Planning called the contributor scenario) I think my team did a pretty good job getting some very usable reporting elements. Now I get to point you to things my...

So in a previous post I tried to tear down Gemini to something relatively simple, instead of curing cancer. This post is when I build it back up. Gemini just lets end-users combine data without having to get IT and DBAs involved. This is precisely where...

Most of the people reading this blog have probably also seen demos or at least heard of Gemini and it’s magical powers of solving all BI problems known and unknown. (And you probably want to be looking at it. You can see if you get accepted to the CTP...

Well radio silence has been maintained quite successfully. Sorry for the lack of updates but with Planning development ended I haven't had a lot to say… Office 2010 (aka Office 14) is finally starting to see the light of day. I know some of you by now...

I imagine that very few people who read this blog don't already know about the Microsoft BI Conference happening in Seattle this year during October 6-8. I'll be spending as much time as I can there (since I'm local its easy for me to go but I've still...

Its been quite a while since I've posted. I've still been hanging out in the PPS TechNet forums, but just haven't been finding as much time to post. I've had a little change in job duties that are taking some time to adjust to. Anyway I'm very pleased...

If you haven’t seen it yet the english builds are available! http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3444589&SiteID=17   I have some details about the addin performance improvements http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost...

It's actually hard to say. This process is asynchronous which is why the status is initially Pending, then WaitProcess, then finally Partial/Submitted. See my other posts about assignment statuses and assignment actions for more details and a quick overview...

To filter rows and columns by a filter selection has previously been discussed here . But one thing you might not have noticed is that the list of property values (aka the filter scope) is static. If a new member property appears the form needs to be...

(Sorry for the gap since my last post, things have been a bit busy lately in Peter Eb. land…) One simple way to do this filtering is to enable suppress blank rows or suppress blank columns. Then when there is no data (non-null) in the cube for those rows...

Workflow handles jobs, cycles, assignments and more. In keeping with my focus on the PPS Planning Business Client (aka Add-In for Excel), this post will just cover those actions related to assignments. In keeping with my new analogy of describing workflow...

There are 2 kinds of ranges that the PPS Planning Member Picker supports: 1) From the selected member to an offset from current period (or vice versa). 2) Or from an offset from the current period to another offset from the current period. (It's also possible to simply use an offset from the current period without a range specified). When using the member picker with Time look for the special dropdown that appears - hopefully this isn't surprising - called...."Time"!...

For data entry forms (and even some reports) its pretty important to keep contributors focused on their specific task. Its especially easy for users who are not familiar with OLAP or PPS to be confused by some things: "TimeDataView" and "Business Process...

Workflow in PPS Planning is completely asynchronous. This allows the server side to scale and handle many, many simultaneous submissions, job requests etc. Its possible to add more server's to the pool that handles this asynchronous queue. From the add...

This is a confusing error for users and form authors alike, especially since the add-in help does not have a glossary entry for "filter scope". I fear I came up with the error text, so I apologize. So to hopefully rectify this situation, we...

A common request by form authors is to create a "start here" worksheet page where contributors can change some global filters. Then they advance to other worksheets in the workbook to do their actual data entry. Other times authors just want to link multiple...

Short answer : In SP1 the PPS Planning add-in will use the where clause and life for MDX experts will be back to normal.* Long answer : Because of the extra properties needed for writeback. The CellSet returned by AdoMd.Net does not return member properties...

Bonus post that isn't specific to PPS. HOWTO use an Excel custom number format to display a number in thousands or millions etc. ...

Also phrased: How can I create an "asymmetric crossjoin" without using custom MDX? MDX experts will probably recognize this issue right away and understand how to build a matrix from scratch for this. But not everybody recognizes that the add-in has specific...

Sorry this isn't a super technical post, most of this information should be pretty well known by now. Ah the glory of having your own blog: you get to say a lot of junk that everybody already knows but you repeat anyway just to sound important.... Off hand there are 6-ish ways I can think of to describe how to author a report on PPS Planning data. Not all of them involve the PPS Planning Business Client (aka the add-in) but I will spend the most time with the add-in based options. The first 2 and the last 1 are the most common based on my experience. ...

A recent post by "abdulmohi" in the PPS Planning forums asked about linking or cascading filters. So that once one filter was selected, another filter would be updated to match the first. In abdulmohi's case it was obvious what the linkage should be because...

Well, I'm a developer working on the "Business Client" for the Planning side of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server (aka the PPS Add-In for Excel or the PPS Planning Add-In). My main area of responsibility has been the data-entry and workflow features...