Skip to content

Tag: Analyze

Power BI Analyze in Excel – The beginning of a beautiful thing?

Published April 8, 2016

One of the announcements made at the Microsoft Data Summit in this past March 2016 was the availability of Analyze in Excel. This feature allows an Excel workbook to connect to a data model that is stored in the Power BI service, and to use it to analyze the data contained within. With this approach Excel is not importing data, or at least it is not importing any more data than the query results. It is exactly like connecting data to SQL Server Analysis Services data sources, something that Excel users have been doing for years. Well, to be completely accurate, it’s not LIKE connecting to SSAS, it IS connecting to SSAS. The only difference is that in this case SSAS is in the cloud. This feature significantly enhances the utility of the Power BI Service, and is important for several reasons that may not be all that obvious. I’d like to walk through a few of them, but let’s start with the obvious.

Excel is a very powerful analytical tool

As nice, and as attractive as Power BI visuals are, Excel still rules the roost when it comes to doing advanced analytics. Excel has been doing this for years and is very mature. It supports features such as pivot tables, pivot charts, and drill through to data, where Power BI reports still do not. The lack of these features can be a blocker for Power BI on its own, but if the data models in Power BI can be analyzed with Excel, suddenly a move to Power BI is not an either/or decision – you can have it both ways. You can deploy models and reports into Power BI and take advantage of all the goodness there, but you can also connect with Excel when the deep analysis is needed. With Analyze in Excel, you can have it both ways.

A wider audience for your data models

Very often, the person that builds the data model is the same person that does the analysis. This is the nature of self-service analytics. In the past when the only multidimensional analysis tools were OLAP cubes and connected Excel workbooks, cube design was a specialized skill. The cubes were published and users would use them as is. The advent of the data model (Power Pivot) and self service analytics lowered the skills bar so that analysts could acquire data, model it and analyze it, making the entire process much quicker and responsive. However, this still puts the model out of reach for those with no data modeling skills or interest.

Analyze in Excel provides the best of both worlds. Analysts can build models and reports in Power BI, and users that need more in depth analysis can connect to them with Excel without having to reinvent the wheel. This in effect provides the same capability that PowerPivot for SharePoint does on premises. One model can now reach a much wider audience of users. This has many of the benefits of an on-premises SSAS deployments without all of the organizational overhead of getting them up and running.

Uses the Analysis Services OLEDB Driver

The connection that is made from Excel to the Power BI services uses the latest version of the classic Analysis Services OLEDB driver. This is the driver that has always been used to allow Excel (and other tools) to communicate with Analysis Services, and this new version has been updated in order to work with the cloud based SSAS service. In fact, in order to use the feature, you must first download and install the updated driver. Therefore, in theory, any tool that uses this driver should be able to communicate with Power BI models as if Power BI was one great big SQL Server Analysis Services server (because it is).

It really is Analysis Services in the cloud

The Power BI service itself is backed by tabular mode SSAS. Until now, it was necessary to go through the service to access it. Analyze in Excel is the first instance that I know of that a client application communicating directly with that SSAS instance. While this connection is really using the Power BI API, it does beg the question – can a fully Platform as a Service version of Analysis Services be very far away?

Claims based authentication and Power BI API

None of the products in the SQL Server suite currently supports claims authentication. This is true even for the yet unreleased SQL Server 2016. Even SQL Azure, a cloud based version of SQL Server, requires SQL authentication only (although Azure Active Directory authenticated databases are currently in preview). However, looking at the connection string contained in the ODC file used by the Analyze in Excel feature reveals some interesting things. Here’s one connection string:

<odc:ConnectionString>Provider=MSOLAP.7;Integrated Security=ClaimsToken;Identity Provider=AAD;Data Source=https://analysis.windows.net/powerbi/api;;Initial Catalog=xxxxxxx; ……..

The value MSOLAP.7 for the provider indicates that this is the next version of the SSAS OLEDB Driver. No surprises there, but this does hint at future compatibility (see SharePoint below). The value for Integrated Security, and Identity Provider (ClaimsToken and AAD) indicate that it is leveraging Azure Active Directory Claims authentication. We therefore have a version of SSAS that can use Claims based authentication. This isn’t available to on-premises installations, but given that the capability has been built, I imagine that it is not all that far away.

Finally, the Data source indicates that the Power BI API is being used to marshal all communication with the back end API service. I think that it is reasonably to conclude that any API for a PaaS based version of SSAS would be based on, or strongly resemble the Power BI API. They may even be one and the same.

Excel Online in SharePoint

As anyone that has set up PowerPivot for SharePoint can tell you, SharePoint supports the configuration of new OLEDB drivers. This support carries forward into the Office Online Server in the world of SharePoint 2016. Given that both SharePoint and OOS utilize claims based authentication, it should theoretically possible to create a workbook that uses the Analyze in Excel feature, store it in SharePoint, and have it work for multiple users from within a browser. I imagine that more plumbing is needed at this point, but it would be an interesting way of integrating Power BI in the cloud with SharePoint both on premises and Online.

Reusing the Excel Files, and Limitations

In the same vein as discussed with SharePoint, Power BI itself allows Excel files to be interacted with in the service in exactly the same manner that Excel Online does. Theoretically, one should be able to use Analyze in Excel to build a workbook, then connect it to Power BI and have it work for interaction. While it is possible to connect it, all interactions fail at the moment. It appears that the Power BI service (or the backing Office Online service) does not yet support the new OLEDB driver.

Another current limitation of this feature is that data sources using Direct Query (this includes SSAS sources) or sources created by the Power BI API cannot be used with Analyze in Excel. At least not yet.

Analyze in Excel is another useful tool in the Power BI arsenal, but as outlined above, I think that it’s a harbinger of even greater things to come.

7 Comments

Analyze in Excel – Setup and initial issues

Published April 4, 2016

Analyze in Excel is an extremely important new Power BI feature for reasons that I’ll outline in more depth in an upcoming post. If you want to try this feature for yourself, there’s a good possibility that you’ll hit one of the errors that I ran into. This post will hopefully help other intrepid pioneers past the hurdles and get working with this fantastic new feature.

Initialization of the Data Source failed

In order to enable the Analyze in Excel feature, Excel must use the Microsoft AS OLE DB Provider from SQL Server 2016. This driver supports claims based authentication for SSAS, which is what Power BI uses. Observant readers will notice that I just used “claims based authentication” and “SSAS” in the same sentence, but I digress. What’s that you say? SQL Server 2016 has not yet reached RTM? That’s OK because you can use the driver from the Release Candidates, which can be obtained from the SQL Server 2016 Feature Pack directly. More commonly though, you’ll get it from Power BI user interface. There it can be acquired in one of two ways.

You can proactively download the updates from the Power BI “Download Center”, which is the little down arrow in the upper right of the toolbar:

Clicking the “Analyze in Excel updates” button will download the installer for the driver, which you can run right away.

Running the file takes you through the installation of the driver, which is simple and wizard driven.

Once installed, you may then navigate to a data source and launch “Analyze in Excel”.

At this point you will be prompted for two things. Firstly, you will be prompted to download and launch an ODC. This is the connection file that will be used to connect your Excel client to the SSAS service that your data source is housed in. If you’ve already installed the new driver, you can just go ahead and run it, and Excel will launch. If you haven’t you can take advantage of the second (simultaneous) prompt, which is to download the driver. This prompt will appear whether or not you have already installed it.

This approach is a bit different. This dialog has a big yellow box that just begs to be clicked, and it will install the 32-bit version of the driver. You can also take the high road and install the 64-bit version which of course you’ll need if your Excel is 64 bit. After all, anybody serious about doing data in Excel is using 64 bit Excel, right? In any event that’s the difference between the second approach and the first. The first approach does not give the option, it just goes ahead and uses the 32-bit version.

I of course originally opted for the first option, and whenever the ODC launched, and Excel opened, I received the error “Initialization of the Data Source failed”, which is hardly intuitive.

The issue of course is a mismatch between the bit level of the driver, and the bit level of Excel. The solution to this problem is quite simple. The 32-bit version needs to be removed, and the 64-bit version installed. You’ll find the offending package in listed in Programs and Features as “Microsoft AS OLE DB Provider for SQL Server 2016”, but it makes no mention of the bit level.

If you happen to have both installed (you can) the only way to tell the difference between the two is that the 64-bit version is that the 64-bit version is about twice as large. This distinction also holds for the installer files – they are named the same but the 32-bit version is approximately 29 MB, and the 64-bit version weighs in around 62 MB.

Excel cannot find OLAP cube Model

About a week ago I completed a small IoT project that takes data from several weather stations and pumps it into a number of sources, one of them being Power BI. Writing data directly to a Power BI data model through the API (which is what Azure Streaming Analytics does) introduces a number of idiosyncrasies into the mix, one of them being that the data can only be updated from the API. Apparently another is that you can’t use the Analyze in Excel feature with it. The error that you get when you try to do so is:

You also cannot use Analyze in Excel with any Direct Query data sources or on-premises SSAS through a gateway. The solution to this is apparently patience – it’s currently not supported. I can only presume that it is coming soon, but for now, you can stop beating your head against the wall, it won’t work.

The HTTP server returned the following error: Forbidden

This one sounds pretty ominous, doesn’t it? It also doesn’t make sense. You needed to be logged in in order to find the “Analyze in Excel” button in the first place, but this error is indicating that you don’t have access. This problem occurs when you have multiple AAD (Organizational) or Microsoft accounts, and you are maintaining a connection to one that does not have access to the data source. It’s particularly galling, and difficult to remedy if you have an AAD account and a Microsoft account that use exactly the same email address. I know, because I do. In order to fix this, you need to force the connection to logout, but the only way to do that currently is to modify the ODC file.

An ODC file is simply an XML file that can be edited with any text editor. Once open, you search for the connection string (<odc:ConnectionString> and add the desired user ID to it by adding “User ID=account” as in the example below:

Launching it after the edit will force the logout of the previous connection and you should be presented with a login screen for the correct one. Unfortunately, in the case like mine where the two accounts are named identically, this does not work. What you must do is to use a different account first. This will force the logout. Once that is done, you can add the correct account, or remove the User Id section altogether. Subsequent launched will force the login, where you can choose the correct login type, and the feature will work.

These few tips should help you get up and running with Analyze in Excel, and shortly I’ll be discussing the reasons that I think this feature is such a big deal.

5 Comments