When you use Power Pivot, there are a number of operations requiring more than one click (or much more than just Excel):
- Creating a pivot table based on the current data model (at least 2 or 3 clicks)
- Create a table of existing measures (including its DAX expression)
- Create a table of existing calculated columns (including its DAX expression)
- Format with DAX Formatter the DAX expressions you extracted from measures and calculated columns (one copy/paste operation each)
- Display memory usage by table and column (you can use VertiPaq Analyzer, which provides a lot of detailed information, but you have to restore the data model in Analysis Services to use it – or you can use some VBA macro, but it’s still more than one-click if you have to copy the macro)
The good news is that a student I had in Paris at a Mastering DAX workshop invested time to create a collection of VBA macros that are shown to the user in a clean and nice ribbon called Power Pivot Utilities.
When I’ve seen this ribbon, I thought it is so useful that it should be shared to a wider audience, so I asked to its author, Bertrand d’ARBONNEAU (bertrand.d-arbonneau@gemalto.com) how to do that. After a short conversation, we decided to publish it on SQLBI, so you can already download Power Pivot Utilities from the Tools section. We will keep the version on the web site up to date when Bertrand will release fixes and updates.
I am pretty sure many people will appreciate this tool: enabling VertiPaq Analyzer on Power Pivot is a top requested feature, and this tool is a nice replacement waiting for a major upgrade to VertiPaq Analyzer, which require a longer work.
Kudos to Bertrand for his job!