PowerPivot/Excel Alternative ideas?

**simbalyon303** · 04-30-2013, 10:13 AM

I have an issue which i dont think is unique and hoping someone has come across a solution previously;

My machine is extremely powerfull and can run huge excel/powerpivot files at ease (12 processers and 32gb ram), however most of the people viewing my data are running little spec laptops and struggle to even open the data files let alone do anything with them.

Has anyone come across a peice of software or solution to pivot some data, without actually opening the data as such, so you run the pivot set your criteria it goes off gets the data and then just shows the results with no way of diving down except re running the report. I am kinding of remembering some SQL stuff here, but not familiar with it.

I have found something that seems to do the job "http://www.clickview.co.uk/" however it is quite costly, any ideas would be much appreciated.

**MarvinP** · 04-30-2013, 10:20 AM

You might try settings the calculation mode of the workbook to manual. It would only recalculate when told to do so. See if this helps or simply confuses people more.

**JosephP** · 05-01-2013, 06:30 AM

this may assist with the file sizes http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downl....aspx?id=38793

**Kyle123** · 05-01-2013, 06:38 AM

Can't you pre-pivot it in sql?

**simbalyon303** · 05-01-2013, 08:37 AM

MArvin, this would not work becuase they literally can not even open the file due to the size of it, however thank you for the input.

Joseph, thank you, will take a look

Kyle, yes you could, with a little research from me.

**simbalyon303** · 05-07-2013, 05:08 AM

Any more ideas?

the powerpivot optimisation worked better, but still open to alternatives.

**Kyle123** · 05-07-2013, 07:20 AM

Can't you just do some nifty queries in SQL (I am assuming that you don't actually store gargantuan amounts of data in Excel and you actually have them stored properly in a database) and set these up in the workbook?

When I've had similar situations in the past, I've usually found that most people don't actually need/use the underlying data, so I run daily batch queries overnight to consolidate datasets into static tables with most of the calculations done in SQL out of hours.