Powerpivot Field List greyed out / Excel non-responsive

Question

1. OS: Windows XP SP3 32-Bits
2. EXCEL 2010 Professional Plus 32 Bits
3. Powerpivot CTP3 Denali 32-Bits
4. SQL 2008 R2
5. 400,000 Records in total (Via SQL query)

Hei (Hi in Norwegian:))

For the last couple of months I've been struggling to find a solution to my problem. As you can read from title "Powerpivot Field List greyed out / Excel non responsive"  (see  image). I've tried absolutely everything but without luck. Sometimes it worked if you "leave it" for a couple of hours.

So today finally I found a solution. Basically you need to lock your machine, like when you go for those coffe breaks :) (by that I mean Crtl+alt+supr & click in lock PC (In norwegian lås datamaskinen). Then you need to reenter your session and voilá! powerpivot and excel now are responsive).

Hope this help another users... I've been looking for months for a solution in many websites but this one worked for me. 

Regards,

Patricio

 

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patricio

Answer 1

Hi Patoduck,

It seem this issue has been asked several times, but I cannot reproduct this phenomenon, in order to do some research to this issue, could you please share your issued PowerPivot workbook, you can upload it to your skydrive space https://skydrive.live.com/ or you can also send it to [e-mail] Lastly,many thanks for your workaround, it must be helpful to other commnumites.

Thanks,
Challen Fu

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Answer 2

I have the exact same issue with one workbook (I have another one, bigger, that is working perfectly). At start, I was able to fix the issue be closing and reopening excel but now, even rebooting the computer doesn't fix it.

This is a 20 mb file, with 4 tables (biggest one with 150K lines). When I right-click the field list view, I can see the normal menu offering me the normal options. I can even slide fields into slices/values sections with no problem, except I cannot see them.

Locking the computer did not fit it,

Thanks for your help,

Guillaume

 

Answer 3

Me too have the same problem. The problem can be fixed when the workbook is closed and reopened like Guillaume mentioned before. Strange enough I don't see the fields in the PowerPivot field list but I still can click on the fields. It looks like something is running in the background (PowerPivot) and the (list)box with the field does not get redrawn.

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Eddy N.