Question:

I've created a pivot widget with data from an Excel sheet.  So far so good.  Now I added a few lines to the Excel sheet and clicked 'Refresh' on the pivot widget.  The new data did not come up in the pivot.  Is this a bug?

Answer:

When connecting to an Excel sheet (or CSV file), you must explicitly tell Prism to bring in the new data into its internal database.  This is done by right clicking on the Data Source selection box (just above the data browser) and navigating to 'Synchronize'.  Only after this is done, should it be possible to refresh the widget.

So the bug is that the 'Refresh' option appears available when it should in fact be disabled (clicking it doesn't really do anything).   After you synchronize, your refresh operation will work.  Just make sure you save the Excel file with the new data before you synchronize, because Prism reads this data directly from the file on the hard drive.

Thanks for taking the time to report this.

Elad