Ben Sullins Tech

If you’ve not heard of Gemini yet you’re in for a treat. I found these videos on youtube yesterday of the Gemini demo from the BI conference last year that you can view below.

Gemini is a new part of the MS BI stack that is an add-in for Excel that allows power-users the ability to essentially create their own cubes using virtually any data they can get their hands on.

Being the MS BI geek that I am, this opens up all sorts of new opportunities for prototyping solutions and enabling the business to build their own BI applications.

The key here, that I see, is that these solutions are not managed by IT. So, as soon as one of these Gemini cubes becomes business critical, it will need to be built using formal BI methods and tools so that the proper support procedures can be implemented. This is what scares me :-S

I can foresee smaller businesses that are resistant to change, or are scared of the term “Data Warehouse” from prior failed projects, that would want to implement Gemini solutions as business critical applications. Simply because it’s cheaper to implement in the short term, ignoring the lack of sustainability that a more traditional BI solution yeilds.

Enough rambling for now, watch the videos and let me know what you think…

I was recently fighting with Excel because I was sick of it wanting to run in Compatibility Mode by default. Everything I found out there said that you simply need to change the option for Save-As to be the 2007 format. This only seemed to work on the workbooks I had open. If I closed and re-opened Excel it would be back in Compatibility Mode.

Remembering from my old days of hacking Excel 97 workbooks and creating templates with Macro’s I recalled a way to change the default workbook that Excel would use when starting up. This is where the ‘ah-ha’ happened.

Below are the steps you may use to force Excel out of Compatibility Mode when it starts up if changing the aforementioned Save-As method does not work for you.

1. Open Excel (you should get Book1 [Compatibility Mode] by default)
2. Save-As (F12) and save it as Book1.xlsx (the 2007 format) in the following location:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\XLSTART

3. Restart Excel

That’s it! Excel by default will look in this location (based on where you installed Excel) for the default workbook it uses when starting up. Since you have saved it in the 2007 format Excel will no longer run in Compatibility Mode by default. It will only do this when opening .xls files that were saved in Compatibility Mode. For those, just save as .xlsx and you should be good.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Ben

Sometimes files are received such as client feeds that contain values in columns that exceed the maximum number of characters allowed in the destination database. When these records are imported an error occurs when trying to fit this value into the column with the character limitation. In these cases it is helpful to have a quick way to identify which fields and specific records are causing the issue. Ideally the ETL process that loads the data would provide this information to us but, in the spirit of catching errors before they occur, here is a quick way to accomplish this in Excel.

Assumptions

1. The file is in a format that can be parsed by Excel (tab delimited, CSV, etc…)
2. The number of rows does not exceed the maximum allowed by the version of MS Excel being used.
   • Excel 2003 = 65,536 rows
   • Excel 2007 = 1,048,576 rows

Steps

1. Open the file in excel (parse it if it’s text)
2. Insert a new row above the header row
3. Enter the following formula in every column of the new row that is being imported
   • =MAX(LEN(A2:A65636))
   • The range inside the forumla should cover all of the rows in the column (eg. A2:A100) for records 2 – 100
   • In order for this formula to work properly you must press ctrl+shft+enter after typing in the formula.
   • The best way to get this into all the additional columns would be to simply copy and paste.

At this point you will be able to see the max length of the values in the columns with the formula entered. To make this more readable and even easier to identify try completing these additional steps below.

Additional Steps

1. Select both the row with the formula in it and the header row for all columns with values and press ctrl+c (copy)
2. In a new sheet under the Home > Paste > Paste Special
3. From the paste special dialogue box check ‘Values’ and ‘Transpose’ then click ok

You will now see the fields and their max lengths stored vertically instead of horizontally as they were on the original sheet which I’ve found to be the easiest to read.

Hope this helps!