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When using Power Query (Get & Transform) in Power BI and Excel, you have the ability to merge queries together and expand the dataset to view all the columns in your merged dataset. While you can do this in Power BI, the intrinsic join capabilities of that software program do not require you to perform […]

I have been helping several customers recently with their reporting performance issues. The reports themselves performed well, but the data refresh took forever. There are two simple steps in Power Query for Power BI and Excel (Get and Transform in Excel 2016) that can drastically reduce your data refresh times. After making your connection to […]

Learn how to create a Major Milestone report for Microsoft Project Online using Excel and Power Pivot in this video.  We cover every step from creating the data source, adding a calculating field, to formatting the report and adding a company logo!  Watch the video!

Today I was working with the Project Online Projects and ProjectWorkflowStageDataSet tables in PowerBI.  I wanted to created a chart that showed data points that involved workflow status, projects, tasks.  The many to one relationship between the ProjectWorkflowStageDataSet and Projects table was causing an issue when combining these data-points.  This required I create a filtered […]

This was an issue that occurred when working specifically with Excel 2016 under the following conditions:   Create a connection to a datasource using Excel's typicall method of connecting to a datasource. Create a Pivot Table or Pivot Chart Drag a date field to one of the Area's section (i.e. Rows, Columns, Values, Fiter, Axis) […]

In many environments, presentations are always offered in PowerPoint format. This is true even if the recipients will receive the deck via email, rather than viewing it in a meeting. For report writers and deck assemblers, this has presented a paint point. Why? Because, if your information is in an SSRS report, it is necessary […]

One of the reports we’re frequently asked to create is a Milestones Report. Sometimes these are part of a project-by-project Status Report. Sometimes they are part of a portfolio report, where we might want to see the significant activities across all our projects.  The following tips can be used in any situation that involves reporting […]

Many of our clients have taken advantage of the workflow capabilities in Project Server and Project Online. Two of the biggest reasons to do this: Tracking approval for governance transparency Being able to see, at any time, where the project is in its progress Item 2 is getting a lot of attention these days. With […]

Most of the reports I create have a time element… Which client used the most project hours last year? ….. How many hours are my QA people scheduled to work next month?  Without that time framework, the information is less valuable. Time phased reports do, however, have an unfortunate side. The tables we must use […]

Over the last few months, we’ve been exploring Time Phased reporting using Excel.  In our last post on this subject, Project Online Time Phased Reporting in Excel part II, we talked about using the Time table in Odata reporting. This handy table gives you several date references for a huge list of dates so we […]

Recently, we were working on a nice set of Project Online timesheet reports for a client.  The fields we needed were in these Odata tables: Tasks TimesheetLines TimesheetLineActualDataSet We knew we were going to need to create some calculated fields, so we decided to use PowerPivot.  We needed to create relationships between these 3 tables, […]

We love using Excel with Project Online or Project Server to pull updated live data at any time. Often, our clients want to see this data with some sort of conditional formatting.  Maybe it’s a heatmap throughout a numbers grid, or perhaps text highlighted  in bold or red when a number exceeds a threshold. In […]

Project Center is a great tool for presenting a portfolio in a snapshot. Using the right filters and grouping, you can quickly show health across the portfolio, projects grouped by client, capitalized vs. non-capitalized projects with costs. And all of this without manipulating a report. By nature, time is not an element we frequently feature […]

Being a visual person, I love the idea of charts, views and graphs. These tools make it easy to tell your story at a glance.  Are our projects in good health? Do we need more resources to accomplish our goals? Is our risk level above our threshold? The primary example of this sort of reporting […]

Many customers want to know, what are the main reasons I should start using Microsoft Project Online. One of the biggest reasons we see that benefits customers is the ability to make data driven decisions. Project Online is outstanding at equipping team members with the information they need to stay informed and make better business […]

Last week, we talked about using the Odata Timeset table to create time phased reports in Excel: Project Online - Time Phased Reporting in Excel - INTEGENT BLOG We noted the Timeset table provides Week number, Month number and Quarter number for all dates between 1984 and 2049. However, our data often extends across multiple […]

Time Phased Reporting presents special challenges for Project Online users.  The good news is that a simple timesaving solution has been provided. There is an entity set (essentially a table) provided called TimeSet.  This table contains a row for every date from 1984-2049. For each of these dates, fields are provided for Quarter, Month, etc: […]

The functionality in Excel’s PowerPivot is wonderful. My favorite is the ability to add columns that contain functions, and I use this frequently for client reports. So, this is all great.  New functionality, happy clients . . . however, when I create a powerpivot data model that overlays the pivot table I display, I can […]