Excel 2010 (32-Bit) PowerPivot Permissions

[back_in_the_1980s]

Hello:

My apologies, for cross-posting. I had posted this in the "Excel Questions" Forum. I'm new and did not see this "Power BI" Forum.

Upon clicking the "Finish" button in the Excel 2010 (32-Bit) PowerPivot Table Import Wizard, I get the "XML parsing failed at line 7, column 397. Illegal name character." error, unless I'm logged in as a Windows Authenticated user with db_owner rights to the SQL database that I'm trying to pull data from.

If I'm logged in as a SQL Authenticated user with db_reader rights, I get this error.

In fact, even logged in as SQL's "sa" login, I get this error.

I read that this error does not happen in version 2 of the Excel 2010 PowerPivot. But, version 2 is for SQL Server 2012. We're on SQL Server 2008 R2.

It sounds like Windows Authentication is going to need to be used, in order to not get this error. But, our database administrator is not going to want to give users db_owner rights.

Is there some sort of other "fix" for this, other than being logged in as a Windows Authenticated user with db_owner rights?

Thank you!

John

 

[Matt Allington]

This is a confusing topic. You don't need version 1 and you can use version 2. The alignment of versions to SQL server is only relevant if you are using analysis services and want version alignment between your workbook (Excel) and the server (say if you want to host your workbooks on SharePoint as a server). Version 2 is a lot better than version 1 and will import data from almost any RDBMS.

 

[back_in_the_1980s]

Thank you, so much, Matt!