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

Imported as Text Columns

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.

Moreover, there is a wrong use of Locale settings and conversion to decimal value gives an initial error
whenever the local settings doesn’t use “.” as decimal separator. However, refreshing data everything
is updated correctly, but the problem is that end users might stop their work before trying to refresh
data after they changed the data type of each measure column to the right type.

Thus, this is the check-list to follow whenever you import measures from an existing SSAS cube to
PowerPivot:

 Change column type to Numeric (all measures are imported as Text by default)
 Refresh data – initial conversion of decimal and thousands separator might be wrong (because
the string is converted to a numeric by PowerPivot, and differences in Locale settings might be
the issue in this conversion), but after you fixed the data type, the following refresh query the
cube again and returns the right value.

More on importing Measures from SSAS cube in #PowerPivot

Several months ago I wrote about the issue importing measures from an Analysis Services cube in
PowerPivot. The short story is that, when you define the MDX query, all columns are imported as Text.
Of course, this is not a good thing for the numeric measures. The workaround is to change Data Type
and then refresh data of the table. However, you might have two issues:

1. You import the table twice. If loading data requires is long, this is twice long
2. You might have an error in conversion when you change Data Type of the column (because
existing strings cannot be converted correctly into numbers – changing Data Type the
conversion happens on these strings, while another code path is executed when you refresh
data from the data source having a column already defined as numeric).

The best thing to do in order to avoid both issues is:

 Define your MDX query adding a slicer that will return no rows in your table
 Change data type of the imported Measures in your PivotTable columns
 Change the MDX query by removing the slicer

I hope this will be fixed in the future, anyway.