PowerBI crashes with no reason

[wangh4]

I am using Windows 7 Enterprise (64 bit), Office 2013 (32 bit) and PowerBI 32 bit. I tried to use 64 bit PowerBi, but can not load the data because my Acccess is 32 bit.  It will not work even after I install the 32 bit access engine.

Well, it crash with no reason when I start to use PowerBi. Sometime I just want to refresh the data or save the PowerBI project.  I have to pray not to crash every time I click a button on the menu. I am so fustrated!

My boss likes PowerBI because it is free and powerful. But he never  know what I went through. Is there any way to get it fixed.  Any help will be appreciated.  I am using 16G RAM and the memory shoule not be a problem.

Thank you!

[edhans]

Memory can be a problem. That is what the 64 bit version is for. The 32bit version can only use 2GB at a time. Once it needs more than 2GB, it either stops, or could crash. I used to see a ton of Excel crashes when I had the 32bit version and using the Power Pivot data model with large sets of data. And by large, I only mean those with a few million rows.

To use the 64 bit version, you'd need to uninstall Office 2013 32 bit and install Office 2013 64 bit, which I highly recommend as both Excel and Power BI Desktop then could use as much memory as necessary. My desktop app often hits 8-10GB of usage for some models.

[wangh4]

HI, Edhans ,

Thanks for your quick response.

I have office2013 right now, which is 32 bit. Is this is the only reason to cause PWI crash?  I used to have PWI (32 bit )and office 2010 (32 bit) to work together. PWI also crashed, but not as frequently as now.  It is beyond my control to upgrade to Office 64 bit.

Thank you!

[edhans]

PBI Desktop can crash when you get corrupt data, or non-ASCII characters in your data. You could try the CLEAN transformation in Power Query to make sure that doesn't happen.

Having office 32 bit doesn't cause PBI Desktop to crash, but you either have to stick with PBI 32bit to work with office, and that will be more susceptable to crashing due to the 2GB memory constraints, or get PBI 64 bit and don't interact with Office 32 bit apps like Access. 

It wouldnt' affect working with Excel spreadsheets. PBI Desktop has built in connectors for XLSX files. It just cannot work with ACCDB files without the proper components, and those are dictated by your Office install.