PowerPivot failed to refresh while followng the Technet BI hands-on labs

Question

Dear all,

I am following the BI Hands-on labs find in technet here --> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh223276.aspx

The only changes i've made is installing all the components on a SINGLE VM running Windows server 2008 R2

Everything works fine until i hit the section "Configure PowerPivot for SharePoint for a BI test environment" find here --> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh487291.aspx

The last step "To refresh the ContosoPromotions workbook" is to test whether the PowerPivot can refresh data update made to the SQL server database table.  When i try to refresh the workbook, no error is given but the data did NOT refresh as expected.  That is, the word "Scholl" is not changed to "School" according to the lab description.

I've checked the Windows event viewer but didn't find any error event.

I then open the browser and navigate to the PowerPivot workbook "ContosoPromotions", and click "Manage PowerPivot Data Refresh".  The scheduler shows that the refresh has failed and the reason is "Access is Denied".

I pretty sure i've followed all the steps correctly.

Any idea what went wrong?

Thx.

BR
Chris

P.S.  If I open the SAME workbook in Excel directly, go to the PowerPivot add-in and refresh the data, i can see the word "Scholl" is changed to "School" correctly.

Answer 1

Hi Chris,

Based on your question, here I would give you some advise to troubleshoot:

1. Make sure you have registered the PowerPivotAppPool account in SharePoint Server

2. You have to Creating an Active Directory account for the PowerPivot unattended data refresh account then Granting Read permissions to access the data during data refresh

3. Make sure you have set credentials for the PowerPivot target application

4. Before you can install the PowerPivot add-in for Excel, you must verify that Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.1 is installed on the client computer.

Top four steps is most possible reason for this issue, please have a check to this again. It must be some incorrect steps which cause this phenomenon.

Besides VM using Hyper-V, you can also install a sharepoint server farm then install PowerPivot for SharePoint, you can refer to this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210616.aspx

Thanks,
Challen Fu

---

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.

Answer 2

Hi Challen, I've followed your suggestion but still couldn't get my PowerPivot to refresh correctly. Anyway, i will keep on trying and pls let me know if you can think of other suggestions. Thx for your help. BR Chris