Using SSAS 2005/2008 as PowerPivot Data Source: Measures Are Imported as Text Columns

Written by Marco Russo

Tuesday, 31 August 2010 21:35

Every measure imported from a SSAS cube is imported as a Text column instead of as a Numeric column. This is very annoying because users are used to use SSAS data with rich metadata, and a measure is usually numeric. Moreover, the standard aggregation used by PowerPivot for a Text column is Count - whenever the measure is a real count (thus, an integer number), this is completely misleading because the user doesn't recognize it is returning a completely wrong value.