Power Pivot Excel 2013 - Source Data issue

[GRCArizona]

Hi - getting familiar with PP for the past few weeks. Got about 4 books that I've gone through, but none really address the issue of "When source data changes..."

I've got a source data file where column headers change each month. It is a 36 month rolling report, so last month had "Dec 15" as the final column. Now "Jan 16" is the final column and "Dec 15" has moved 1 column to the left. I would have thought that the PP Refresh would work fine and column headers would update automatically, but I'm getting an error when I refresh the data.

Source Data is a separate Excel file with about 4000 rows.

Any tips / suggestions / anyone can offer?

thanks in advance,

GRC

 

[olivierhbh]

Hello GRC,

Do you have access to Power Query? To me this sounds like PQ could handle that pretty well.
Also when you mention that you've got months as column headers, I'm thinking unpivot, because dates should be in a single column and not in headers for more analysis flexibility. In PQ you could use the command "unpivot other columns", which would dynamically take in consideration new columns.

After preparing your source you could load it to PP.

I hope I'm clear and it helps.

Olivier.