Save Password on Powerpivot Workbook Connection HANGS project

[rileybloke]

Hello,

Tricky one i'm afraid.
I have an Excel 2013 Powerpivot Project retrieving data from an Oracle Database. And am looking forward to using it with Power Update, but before I do, I need to save the credentials for the Oracle on the connection properties, and for some reason, this project doesn't like it.

If I click the Data tab on the ribbon and go to the properties of the connections, select my Oracle connection, go to the definition tab, I have the option to save password.
I enable this option, it displays a warning about un-encrypted password, click continue, then I attempt to refresh this connection, it hangs and then become unresponsive, I have to kill the excel process to get out.

I have many other projects setup this way with the save password option enabled, and they work ok, they don't ask for the Oracle password.

As soon as I enable this option on this project, it breaks it. Even if I disable it after, its still broken, just hangs on the next data refresh.

I have tried recreating the connection string in the Powerpivot Addin and tests are ok etc, but I notice my changes are not reflected in the actual connection properties from the data tab. I cant edit the connection string from the data tab properties as it says this connection was created in PowerPivot Addin.

Is it possible to delete and re-create the connection without losing all my measures and pivot tables/charts linked to this data connection?
Is there a backdoor somewhere where I can re-specify the connection string?

Im clutching at straws! Project took several weeks to develop, don't fancy re-creating the model and all the charts again.

Thanks all in advance.

 

[scottsen]

Ouch.

Generally, I would just create another table and starting moving all my measures there... then nuke the original table. It sucks. Sometimes (for just this reason) I create a dummy table to hold my measures.

The only other thing I can think of would be renaming your .xlsx to .zip, finding the connections.xml and hacking it it directly. (xlsx files are just a zip file full of xml files). I would... take a backup first

 

[rileybloke]

wow! didnt know about the zip thing, thanks Scott.