Faster OLAP PivotTables in Excel 2016

If you work with connections to OLAP servers, your PivotTables are now faster. The June 2016 update contains query and cache improvements to this powerful feature. You could benefit from these improvements, whether you use PivotTables to answer one-off questions or build complicated workbooks with dozens of PivotTables.

These updates are available to Excel 2016 users as part of an Office 365 subscription. If you are already an Office 365 subscriber, find out how to get these latest updates.

You’ll also need a workbook that has PivotTables connected to either the Data Model or to an OLAP server.

About the improvements

We have made significant improvements in three major areas while querying OLAP servers.

• Improved query efficiency—Excel will query for subtotals only if they’re required to render the PivotTable results. This means you wait less for the OLAP server to finish processing the query and spend less time waiting for the results to transfer over your network connection.
• Reduced the number of queries—Excel is smarter when refreshing your data. It now uses the LAST_SCHEMA_UPDATE property of a connection to limit schema requests to those times when it has, in fact, changed.
• Smarter caches—When the schema is retrieved, it is now shared across all of the PivotTables on that connection, further reducing the number of queries.

Get the full story here https://blogs.office.com/2016/07/07/faster-olap-pivottables-in-excel-2016/