Is upgrading to Office 2013 Pro the answer to my memory problems?

[masplin]

Hi

I have 64-bit 16GB Ram machine that is constantly running out of memory on a big messy project I'm working on. The underlying data is coming form software written in Pascal and it a right told mess!!! i am having to do an enormous amount of filter calculation which I assume where the problem lies. I have read that the new Office 2013 is a massive improvement specifically in this area.

I was thinking I had to buy a much more powerful PC, but sounds like I should be trying the Office 2013 version first. I understand as an at home consultant this is going to be tricky as i have no interest in paying £10 a month for Office 365. So the question is could I go down the volume licensing route mentioned in another post even though I am based in the UK? Has anything changed on how a lowly individual can get hold of this?

Thanks for any advice

Mike

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

What version of Excel do you currently have? In Excel 2010 the PowerPivot Add-In can handle enormous amounts of data. You have to have Office Professional Plus 2013 to get PowerPivot in Excel 2013.

 

[masplin]

I have 2010 64-bit. I watch the memory climb to about 11GB before it keels over. I have a 500,000 row table doing filtered look up on another 500,000 row table becuase I cant get all the data in a single table. The data is being replicated out of Pascal into SQL so i'm linking directly to the SQL tables. If I exported them I could do the combination outside powerpivot, but then I lose the feed. I have failed to get the software company to provide all the data in a single table.

The question is how as a self-employed person in the UK can I get Office Pro plus?

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

As far as I know the only way to get Office Professional Plus is through a Microsoft Volume License Agreement or Office 365.

 

[masplin]

I found an article on Rob Collie's blog about being able ot get aslicence agreemnt ofr $30, but this was all US based so wondering if the same trick works in the UK? hoping someone in the Uk has found a solution.

 

[miguel.escobar]

Ram is only used to store the Powerpivot data and to "hold" all the objects that you have in your worksheet. When you run your measures and play with your pivot tables, slicing and dicing, all that goes into place is the actual query time or as you can see on the status bar at the bottom its the OLAP calculation.

You can try the Office 2013 Pro Plus for free but there are ways to make your current model run faster like:
- sorting your data prior to the initial load with whatever column that you want
Alberto Ferrari : PowerPivot: improve the performances by sorting tables

There are other ways to improve it that were posted in Rob's blog. I'll try to find that post and publish the link here.

hope this helps

 

[masplin]

Hi Miguel. Unfortuantely I have no control over how the data arrives with me. The majority of filtering i'm doing is on 2 fields, invoice numbers and unique cusomter identifier. I'll try sorting by Invoice number as more of them.

 

[miguel.escobar]

you should check this category
Performance « PowerPivotPro

if you happen to have columns in your data model that are not meaningful to you, please delete them.

 

[masplin]

yup deleted everything I can

 

[Jacob Barnett]

Sorry if this is a daft question but if your data is from 2 SQL tables can't you just UNION them together?