Troubleshooting Powerpivot 2013 Issues Caused by Upgrade to Windows 10

[Andrew_UK]

Hi All,

My office was upgraded to Windows 10 today, I run Office 2013 and am a moderate/heavy powerpivot user.

I noticed after the upgrade that one of the main powerpivots which I use wouldn't refresh. Error details suggests that it has an issue connecting to the database, yet when you click "existing connections" via the home tab and test the connections it says they are working correctly.

• I ran some more tests by opening another document and got the same result
• I tried to build a fresh powerpivot from scratch and it didn't error out; it returned the expected tables with all the correct column headers, but with NULL values in every entry
• I tried importing data using Microsoft Query and ODBC. It worked fine

My conclusion is that something is awry with powerpivot. But me and our IT team are thus far stumped as to what. We tried googling but couldn't find anything that led us along what looked like a correct path.

Any ideas?

Andrew

 

[Matt Allington]

It sounds like the connectors. Are you running 32 or 64bit Office! Has that changed with the upgrade of Windows? What data source is causing the issue?

 

[MikeL857]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for replying to Andrew, a little more detail on the issue below:



We've been using an ODBC connector to a DBISAM database for years and had no trouble with it. I'm using Office 365 ProPlus 64bit. While on a Windows 7 install both the connector through Microsoft Query and the connector through Powerpivot worked and pulled data, after a fresh install to Windows 10 using the same ODBC Driver I'm having problems.



Connecting to the data source through Microsoft Query Excel happily pulls data through.



Connecting to the data source through Powerpivot using the table import wizard and checking the data in the Preview Selected Table data is shown.



Once the data is imported into a Powerpivot window however, the table structure appears to pull through, the record count appears to register the correct number of records but the data cells are empty.


If you open the "Edit Table Properties" window you can see the data:

I even added a query to the table Left([field],3) to see if the data was there but hidden, but there is no result.


No data is returned when querying the Powerpivot data when back in Excel.


We've checked and this isn't an issue with Windows 7 64-bit, Excel 64-bit, ODBC Driver 64-bit, its also ok on Windows 10 64-bit, Excel 32-bit, ODBC Driver 32-bit.



Thanks,


Mike

 

[MikeL857]

Just to add further testing we've done, installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 on a non domain computer without any influence of GPO's and that shows the same symptoms.