Newbie Question

[CBROWN1]

Hi-

I am VERY new to PowerPivot & I'm not experienced in any programming languages. I'm not bad at excel so trying to replicate what i can do in PowerPivot is proving tricky.

I have 2 tables that contain numerous columns of data....table 1 contains amongst other things a supplier name table 2 contains both the supplier name and the supplier parent name again amongst several other things. I mention that there are several other columns of data because it means that the supplier/parent names are not unique in either table. Ordinarily in excel i would perform a very simple vlookup to bring the parent name into table 1 but no matter what i seem to try in powerpivot i am running into errors.

Any advice?

Thanks in advance

 

[Jacob Barnett]

PowerPivot doesn't have native support for many to many relationships, meaning that when creating a relationship at least one column must contain unique values as you've discovered.

Without knowing more about your data and what you are trying to achieve it's not easy to make a recommendation but there are a number of techniques explained at SQLBI that are helpful in terms of writing DAX expressions to help you overcome the situation.

If analysing your data by supplier is the main thrust of what you are trying to do then you should look into creating a 'bridge' supplier table which has a row for each supplier plus other data.

If you were to post back some more specific info or, better still, upload a dummy model to DropBox/SkyDrive/GoogleDrive then a more thorough solution can be explored.

 

[miguel.escobar]

If you happen to have a case of Many to many relationship I'd suggest using Data Explorer to create that unique list of values that you need in order to take advantage of your data.

Hope this helps.

 

[CBROWN1]

Thanks folks, I've got it! Thought my supplier table gave me the one in my many to one relationship but just noted that 1 supplier had 2 parents so it was correctly failing...one of those wood for the tress moments!

Thanks again