Hello Out there. This is Ron, one of the co-authors of this book. Is there anyone out there who has read our booK? Any questions or feedback for us?

Thanks,
-Ron Pihlgren

Hi Ron,
Got your book yesterday! :)
I am already working with Power Pivot since 4 months or so but your book gave me some great insight into some parts (e.g. DAX) where before I only was using the try & error principle.

Looking forward to the SharePoint section - will start reading it over the weekend.

But one question: Where is this bloody download section on the wrox.com page?

Have a great day and weekend!

Best regards,
Andreas

Hey Andreas,

Glad you've enjoyed the book so far - hope the SharePoint section is meaningful, eh?! :) Saying this, the download section of the book is in the above section of the forum, the 2nd bullet to the right of the image of the book. Here's the link as well: http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTit...-DOWNLOAD.html

Hope this helps! And don't forget if it is warranted, please do prop up a review of the book on Amazon.com, eh?!

Thanks!
Denny

Hi Ron

Got your book the other day and am working through it. Very good so far, and already answered my first question - 'where does PowerPivot fit in with Microsoft's existing BI stack?'

One problem though - I've restored from the SDRAudit.bak file but some of the tables referenced on page 82 of the book (ie. AuditedObject) are missing - others have different names - ie. DatabasePrincipleName/mapDatabaseGroupName.

Have I missed something here?

As an aside, I don't have access to Sharepoint so was hoping to get as far as I can just on the Excel side of things - I'll see how I get on with that.

Thanks!

Hi Andre,

We're glad you are liking the book so far. We would appreciate an Amazon review once you have completed the book.

On the database issue, I will check on it today (I haven't actually looked at the bits available on the Wrox site yet but will) and reply later this evening.

Thanks!
-Ron

Andre, looks like you are correct - the database file isn't the one that's expected. I'll work on getting the right DB backup file posted. Thanks for posting the issue.

Thanks for looking into that Ron.

Have posted a brief review on Amazon - good book!

Hi Ron,
I am going through your book, and in Chapter 3 you still have issues. Here are the issues as I see them:
1. The SDR_Healtcare.xlsx workbook already has the data loaded. On page 84, you are walking through the steps of loading the data from the SRAudit DB, but the data is already loaded. This applies to the DB tables, as well as the linked Excel Sheet
2. As previously mentioned, the SRAudit database (restored from the Appendix A files) is the incorrect database.

When you combine both of these issues, it becomes kind of a sad story. I don't post to post a negative review on Amazon, so I think it would be great if you guys could fix both the .xlsx file AND the database as soon as possbile.

Thanks,
Bennie

Personally I don't think the problems with the online content should prevent anyone from buying the book and they tend to become fairly obvious as you work through the chapters. This was the first book available on PowerPivot and I'd much rather have it now, glitches and all, rather than having to wait another couple of months. The issues with the online content can easily be resolved by the authors as they are reported.

I would like to point out one thing though - I had problems importing some of the fact table data (Contoso DB I think) due to lack of memory on my 32 bit OS. I see that others had experienced this too and the answer seems to be to remove some of the columns on the fact table - particularly the id column as this doesn't compress well. All was good once I did that.

-Andre

Apologies folks for the confusion. Here's an update:

WRT the SDRAudit.bak database issue: the tables that are missing aren't used in later chapters building the healthcare application. The related tables you need to import are only the auditedAction table and the AuditedClassType tables. The other tables were initially considered to be used but later they weren't. So you can build the app without those tables.

This also affects Chapter 4. On Page 108 (#16), you are asked to create a relationship using the AuditedObject table. This relationship also isn't needed later in the book.

WRT the SDR_Healthcare.xlsx already having the data loaded: The AppendixA.zip file (used to create the starting state of the healthcare app) doesn't contain SDR_Healthcare.xlsx. The various chapter downloads do contain versions of this spreadsheet with data already loaded but that is by design - those chapter downloads are intended to be the state of the workbook at the end of each of those chapters. They are available in case you wanted to play around with those chapters' results without going through the steps of actually creating the app or for working through the instructions of the following chapters without starting from scratch.

I'll send some email to the Wrox folks so that the errata gets updated for these issues.

Just another comment: we did rush to get the book out in time for the release of PowerPivot and apologize for the "rough edges" folks are finding. We appreciate you folks who raise these issues and we will work through them to help get you answers and update the errata pages. Thank you all.

-Denny, Ron, Siva