Compatibility and Refresh

[Juan Sombrero]

Hi all,

Being a Power BI user for quite a long time, I mainly used it for my own personal work. Now I am in a situation where I have to start sharing work. And (shame on me), but the topics of refreshing and compatibility are still blurry to me.

Does anybody now a good article about different versions of powerpivot and powerquery. Some questions I have in mind are:

- can my colleague run a Pivot without having PowerPivot installed
- can they refresh the data model (with all underlying links to databases)
- can they run a query made in power query without having PQ installed?
- are there issues to be concerned when combining Excel 2010 and 2013?
- what do all the different refresh options do (refresh from the Excel UI, form the PowerPivot UI, ...). My understanding is that when you hit refresh in Excel, the data model 'as is' is refreshed into pivot cache, but the connections to external data are not? And when you do it in PowerPivot window, all external data connections are refreshed, and when this connection is a Power Query, the entire query is run.

Anybody has any interesting tips/links that could help me?

Regards,
Juan

 

[Matt Allington]

- can my colleague run a Pivot without having PowerPivot installed
yes if they have office professional 2013. Otherwise no

- can they refresh the data model (with all underlying links to databases)
no

- can they run a query made in power query without having PQ installed?
no

- are there issues to be concerned when combining Excel 2010 and 2013?
yes - don't do it. You can upgrade from 2010 to 2013 but you can't downgrade

- what do all the different refresh options do (refresh from the Excel UI, form the PowerPivot UI, ...). My understanding is that when you hit refresh in Excel, the data model 'as is' is refreshed into pivot cache, but the connections to external data are not?
no. Refresh in Excel refreshes all the external connections to power pivot and the pivot cache.

And when you do it in PowerPivot window, all external data connections are refreshed, and when this connection is a Power Query, the entire query is run.

Yes, but the same is true when you refresh a pivot table.