PowerPivot for Excel 2010 (PowerPivot was one word way back then) didn’t allow you set the data connection to auto refresh after a period of time. You had to use SharePoint to make that happen. It was one of the differentiators they used to get people to spend money around PowerPivot.
Fast forward to today and I realized that I’d never tested this in Excel 2013 and I’d never seen anyone mention it. I tested it the other day and you CAN set a Power Pivot based data connection to refresh on schedule (every X minutes) just like non-Power Pivot based connections. (Another feature of Power Pivot for Excel 2013 is the extra space between Power and Pivot)
Now you can set that dashboard to bring in new info all day long!
While were talking about Power Pivot and Excel, come and join me along with Belinda Allen and Jared Hall as we hang out and talk Excel this Friday at 2pm ET. We’ve decided that when we hang out at conferences all we do is talk Excel and show off stuff we learned. We thought we would bring that online. If you know it all, feel free to make fun…or get your own show. Otherwise, come and learn something with us. We plan to make this a regular occurrence and we’ll probably talk a little GP (you have 2 GP MVP’s and a Microsoft employee who works on GP. It’s inevitable.) but we expect this to be mostly Excel and probably a little geeky. It’s gonna be great!
A reminder, if you don’t want to build your own dashboard in Dynamics GP, Analytics for Dynamics GP provides a great starting point for dashboards.