Excel blog: Dashboard improvements

November 12, 2009

The Excel blog has been on a tear recently.  Someone must’ve lit a fire under those guys.  (Colin?  Are you happy now?  C’mon, you’re excited!)

Great post on Dashboard-related improvements in 2010:

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/11/11/excel-services-in-sharepoint-2010-dashboard-improvements.aspx

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Temperature Mashup Example

November 12, 2009

With everyone getting their hands on CTP3, I decided to take a short break from the football project and show something else that may spark you to try things you otherwise might not.

So, let’s go behind the scenes of the Temperature Mashup example (that’s mentioned here and here).

Part One:

 

Part Two:

 

Recap

Briefly, here are the steps covered in the videos:

  1. Copying the temperature data from Excel and pasting as a new table in PowerPivot
  2. Using CONCATENATE to create “key” columns in both the Temperature and Sales tables
  3. Creating a relationship between those tables, using the key columns created in 2
  4. Demonstrating that the relationship enables slicing sales by temperature
  5. Using a nested IF formula to add a new column to the Temperature table, mapping granular average temperature values into the four buckets Cold, Cool, Warm, Hot
  6. Using that newly-calculated column to slice sales numbers instead

Next up…

Using DAX to create a “Sales per Day” measure! :)

3 Comments | Non-Football Examples | Tagged: | Permalink
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Ugh

November 12, 2009

I’ve spent a lot of time the last two days recording PowerPivot videos – some for this site, and some for a special project.  Today when I uploaded them to YouTube, well, I discovered I’d used too fine a resolution, and you can’t read anything in the formula bar.

Are formulas really all that important in an Excel environment?  I was one sad dude when I saw what I’d done.

Good news:  re-recorded two of them.  They are uploading now.

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Now THAT was bizarre…

November 12, 2009

Got frustrated with my upload speeds just now, decided to try my hand at the ever-popular “complaint tweet” – really it seems like this is 90% of the traffic on Twitter:

               image

The immediately realized I no longer live in Seattle, and have a different provider:

               image 

Turned out, immediately is not fast enough these days.  Literally one second later, this pops in:

               image

Never heard of this person.  Total shock.  Of course the only natural reply was:

               image

Serves me right for contributing to noise :)

I’ll say this, though:  that’s an amazing customer service method.  She’s just scanning all day for mentions of her company and pouncing on them to help.  Wow.  She then proceeded to tell me to check my modem’s web page for upload/download speed…

…but I think my first use of said modem is going to be to find a service with better upstream bandwidth :)

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Does PowerPivot Need Office 2010 Deployed Everywhere?

November 12, 2009

(I’m working on several meaty videos at the moment and you should expect a lot of content to show up in the next few days.  In the meantime I’m gonna post a few quick-hitters to keep things fresh).

I get this question a lot:  “Wow, this PowerPivot stuff is hot, but it’s gonna be forever before I can get my company/customers to upgrade to Office 2010 – they just now finished rolling out 2007!”

Fear not.

Yes, the Excel power users that are designated as PowerPivot authors – they need Excel 2010.  But no one else does.  And even those Excel power users can install 2010 side by side with the corporate standard version of Office.

SharePoint 2010, of course, is required on the server, and typically, servers are faster to upgrade than desktops…  by a lot.  But even on the server, you don’t have to upgrade the entire SharePoint universe – as the Bing case study showed, you can deploy your own departmental PowerPivot server with ease.  (In Darinee’s case, it’s under her desk).

2 Comments | Quick Tips & Tricks | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by powerpivotpro