Forum Discussion
Does someone know if bi-directional cross-filtering will appear in Power Pivot?
Right now found in discussion under this Many to Many Relationships in Power BI and Excel 2016 blog Marco Russo's answer on the question why bi-directional is omit in 2016:
"Because it would have changed the binary format of Power Pivot model, making the file incompatible with Excel 2013. They wanted to avoid the issue existing between Excel 2010 and Excel 2013 when you have a data model. You have to upgrade to open it in 2013, and after that you cannot open it in 2010. So for Excel 2016 they wanted to keep full compatibility of binary file format."
Nice spot - thanks. I'd like to see where this lands - it's a pretty fundamental incompatibility. The portable nature of Power Pivot is what makes it particularly compelling.
Can't say i understand that issue with binary model. Done small exersize - created two identical simple models in pbix and Excel, the only difference pbix has bi-directional relationship and Excel one-to-many. Unzip both; extract DataModel from pbix; rename as item.data and replace one within the Excel. When open the updated Excel file (yes, there were some alerts) - and PowerPivot shows bi-directional within it's model. Slicer works from many-to-one.