“Don’t you, forget about me.”

-Excel Pros Everywhere

From the beginning I’ve been talking about three different kinds of PowerPivot professionals:  Excel pros, SharePoint pros, and Database pros, and how they will all need to cooperate in order to get the most out of the system.

As far as I can tell, though, the majority of visitors to this site are from the Database camp (I lump Business Intelligence pros into this bucket).  Not surprising perhaps, since PowerPivot is a product of the SQL team at MS, and marketed heavily at conferences that db pros attend.

But for every db pro in an organization, there may be more than 100 Excel pros.  So, I think it’s clear that the PowerPivot message (and messaging) have a long way to go yet (it WAS just released, after all).

John Constant is one of the Excel pros who are “early to the party,” and has been sifting through all of the available PowerPivot materials for many months now, both the official MS stuff and the community offerings.

He raises some very valid points, things that I lose sight of at times.  It’s SO much simpler to grab a sample db from the SQL team and use it for blog examples for instance.  Even the Great Football Project starts with such a data source.

But I firmly believe that an organization’s success with PowerPivot rests in part on very competent training for the Excel pros…  and part of “competent” is “tailored to the Excel pro’s existing knowledge and viewpoints.”  In fact, I’d be out providing that kind of training this month if it weren’t for being very busy, the good kind of busy, applying PowerPivot for Pivotstream’s customers.

Without further preamble, I give you the words of John Constant:

PowerPivot vs the Excel Power user

Many moons ago, I can’t even remember where, I saw a comment…  Microsoft is coming out with a new business intelligence service… code named .. Gemini.  I was intrigued.  I had recently been tasked of coming up with some sort of data table /system  / process / spreadsheet / Excel voodoo to help put our business (and the competition) in perspective.  Hmm… a new tool you say.  So I delved into any links or articles I could find.  I saw the Donald Farmer video of Gemini sorting through millions of rows of video rentals – updating the charts/tables on the fly and .. sigh.. it was like love at first site.  I signed up for the beta at the first opportunity – archaic business software be damned! .  I was fortunate enough back in early fall 2009 to get my initial private beta Office 2010 release.  I was having a field day with the sparklines and the soon to be essential slicers, waiting with baited breath for the initial Gemini release.

The Microsoft talk was great.  It COULD be a standalone product.  It was meant for Excel power users and for IT and Data Administrators and Managers and so much more… but I’ve heard the talk before.  Don’t even get me started on the failings of Mappoint….   But low and behold – Gemini, with a few hiccups worked.  Sure if you linked in or brought in new data, it may corrupt all your work and you would have to start from scratch, but it’s beta.  Silly, silly beta.  It will grow up.  Sure there’s a new language that looks something like native excel formulas and there’s stuff that you take for granted working with Excel pivot data that you can’t do with Gemini… but it’s beta.. silly silly beta. It’s still growing.. be patient.  Help is on the way.  And help arrived.  There’s PowerPivotPro and PowerPivot.com  and Kasper and a host of other dedicated people who truly believe in the product.  And they do things to help build the community like having SQL workshops and handing out lovely diagrams (http://sqlcat.com/blogs/technicalnotes/image_4AFAE1C3.png) as a prize.

Errr… whoa..  hold on.  Did I mention the initial Microsoft talk?  Did I mention how Power users could use this product to help themselves and their company.  I understand the importance of SQL.  I understand the concept of Cubes; I’ve heard of OLAP (once or twice) but .. did you see that picture?!!  That’s a prize?!  Are you trying to scare away users?!   Let’s go back to Powerpivot.com, the ‘home’ of powerpivot (the grown up name of Gemini).   What’s that first video – the first public introduction of Powerpivot?  It shows a poweruser and PowerPivot for Excel.    Sure, it mentions Sharepoint but the debate continues – who is PowerPivot for? What about the power user?   – the grunts in the field who want to make the most of this product?  I know (reading some postings) there isn’t a large target population, but for some reason I feel like a Who in Whoville.. “We’re here!  We’re Here…. WE’RE HERE!!!!”  And what do I see …  honourable intentions of many esteemed PowerPivot bloggers aimed at….  SQL, OLAP, Business Intelligence users, like speaking to the already converted.

Don’t believe me?  Read your forums, your FAQ’s.  How are the samples set up?  Well you have FactInventory, FactSales, DimDate, DimThis, Dimthat – Dim Witted!   These examples and their structures aren’t what the normal excel user uses – or understands.  I’ve got Sales, I’ve got product, I’ve got territories, I’ve got stuff labeled poorly because they’ve been set up by someone who knew some programming about a decade ago… in other words, I have real word – DIM-LESS – data and structure.  It’s taken a few brick walls but I’ve hit my head enough times that the examples are sinking in but what about all those people that the ‘talk’ is supposed to reach?  Those who really have no experience with SQL or know of Cubes or data structure tables?  What about those people who can’t even consider getting Sharepoint because they are with a small business that doesn’t have the resources (financial or otherwise?).

I know why Microsoft is “selling” PowerPivot. I don’t fault them for that and I know the majority of users will have IT, Data Admin backgrounds, who will be setting up PivotViewers, and templates and services logs- all those lovely bells and whistles and the examples that will cater to those who deal with FactTables and DimData.  And then there were the Excel power users…  seeing a potentially great product aimed at the institutions, the data centres, the IT gods…   sigh…. 

I do not fault the Farmer’s the Collie’s, the Jonge’s, the Russo’s and the many many other dedicated PowerPivot supporters in the world – I thank them for all their hard work.  PowerPivot is a great product with great potential for many people, but just remember the little guy in the equation, the ones that someone deemed somewhere should have access to this power.  Bring it down a level from time to time… walk the walk and talk our talk and remember the Who’s… “we’re here!  We’re HERE… WE’RE HERE!!!”.

Powerpivot user – johncon aka Mongo41 on Twitter

Well, here ya go, the whole slide deck right here:

Yeah, that’s right.  One slide.

You see, it was an “Interactive” session, which is basically “we jam people in a room and they pepper us with questions for 90 minutes.”  The ground rules given to us were “1-2 slides to set the tone, and then after that it’s all audience-directed.”

Going in, I had mixed feelings about that format.  I mean, there’s a real danger that people won’t be prepared to ask questions, and that the conversation won’t get going.  In fact, in many other Interactive sessions, the speakers decided to ignore the ground rules altogether and simply present.  But it seemed like a potentially entertaining approach, and hey, Dave and I were so busy going in that this minimal preparation thing sounded pretty damn good.  So we rolled the dice.

Well, it turned out EXTREMELY well.  We started 15 minutes early, ran over the end time, and were answering fantastic, high quality questions non stop.  It was awesome.

The bad news is, I don’t have a good way to share that discussion after the fact.  We basically would need to do it again, and sadly, they did not record the session.

So for now, all I can really do is offer the teaser above.

“Ouch”

-Rob’s feet, knees, brain, and liver

Hi folks.  On my way back from the MS BI Conference (and TechEd) in New Orleans.  Had a great time, almost too much to report.  Here’s a sample:

1. Met Kasper and Denny for the first time!
2. Met a bunch of other PowerPivot community members like Vidas Matelis, Marco Russo, Stacia Misner, and Andrew Brust…  a bunch of SQL celebrities, like BrentO, SQLRockstar, and BuckWoody…  and a fascinating individual named Jimmy who Kasper and I hope to introduce to all of you soon.
3. Presented a session on Best Practices for PowerPivot (with Dave Wickert) where they literally turned away as many people as they let in – we were all seated, room packed, people standing in the back, and doors closed 15 minutes before scheduled start…  so we just went ahead and started 15 minutes early.  Never had an experience like that, ever.  Even Denny Lee was locked out.
4. Had several private meetings with members of the PowerPivot team, learned a bunch of things (some of which I can share, some I can’t, but everything bodes well for us)
5. Talked with dozens of attendees, got their thoughts on PowerPivot, answered questions on PowerPivot, and staffed Microsoft’s PowerPivot booth on three different days.

So, from all of that, what did I learn?  Here ya go, as compressed as I can get it:

IT attitudes toward Excel are shifting dramatically

“The more you tighten your grip against Excel, the more data will slip through your fingers.”

6-7 years ago when I attended BI conferences, Excel was widely regarded as the enemy, and there were even sessions titled things like “how to get your users out of Excel.”  The prevailing sentiment was that a responsible BI practitioner had a duty to replace Excel with dedicated BI tools like Cognos or Business Objects.

There has been nothing short of a seismic shift since then.  I’d like to think that has something to do with our efforts in Excel 2007 to legitimize Excel as a BI tool, but honestly, I think it’s just that the realization has sunk in…  no one is ever getting rid of Excel.  Furthermore I think it’s more than just capitulation – at this point most people realize that getting rid of Excel would be a bad idea even if it were possible.

Some favorite quotes from IT/BI pros:

“Fact is I get most of my best analytics ideas from my Excel users’ workbooks”
”We’ve been decriminalizing the use of ad hoc Excel”
”Data just wants to be free, data will find a way”
”Rob I am really impressed with your jumpshot, you could play near the highest levels in Holland were you in shape.”

(OK that last one was from Kasper – I felt obligated to include that since he kinda beat me in four out of five games and I need to save face.)

I very much think it’s time to revisit a few of my favorites posts on this topic, so if you have started reading recently, I encourage you to check out:

Microsoft Unveils New Programming Language XL#
Putting the “Intelligence” in “Business Intelligence,” Part 1
Putting the “Intelligence” in “Business Intelligence,” Pt 2
Putting the “Intelligence” in “Business Intelligence,” Pt 3

PowerPivot is arriving at precisely the right moment.  BI and IT pros are embracing it EXTREMELY eagerly.  Much more than we dared hope back when I worked on the engineering team in Redmond, and more than they realize even now I believe.  They are prepared to cooperate with their Excel users in order to bring about a more efficient data culture.  Which brings me to the next point…

PowerPivot does NOT need viral adoption!

Are you listening, PowerPivot team?  I’m going to keep standing up on every soapbox and hilltop I can find, screaming as loud as I can, that PowerPivot does NOT require grass roots adoption in order to be broadly adopted at a record pace!  That perceived need for bottom-up adoption lingers within the team from the early days, and it will be a shame, both for Microsoft and for the rest of us, if they continue to think that way.

Why?  For one, they will build the wrong feature set going forward if viral adoption is still a goal.  Originally for example, data cleaning features were intended to be included in v1.  The thinking here was that the Excel users could not remotely rely on IT to help them, or to provide them the right kinds of data, or even the right kinds of access.  That simply is NOT turning out to be true.

And if the team spends a ton of time building features that aren’t needed, it will subtract from the quality of the other features we get, and/or replace other features altogether.

Second, the marketing message is noisy today.  This dual “top-down through IT and bottom up through Excel user empowerment” message is not being well absorbed by the MS field.  By far, the Excel component is easier for the MS field to understand and repeat.  So it gets a lot more air time than the top-down message.  And as a result, an IT team that otherwise would have been enthusiastically receptive to the first message only get exposed to the “Excel gone wild” message and recoil from it.

This truly is a case of subtraction by addition and should be avoided :)

PowerPivot was the Buzz of the BI Conference

I expected PowerPivot to grab an outsized share of attention at the conference, but multiple people pointed out to me that it basically took over.  People from other companies stopped by at the PowerPivot booth to find out was going on, because everyone coming to their booth was asking things like “how does this integrate with PowerPivot?”

And the Microsoft messaging mirrored that.  PowerPivot dominated the BI keynote on Tuesday – we were all kinda surprised to basically only see PowerPivot demos for 90 minutes (seriously, the other MS BI teams had to be a little irritated by that.  You can watch the keynote here and see what I mean, and maybe see us smiling ear to ear in the first row).  It dominated the overall session count.  It showed up in sessions that weren’t about PowerPivot.

Kasper looked at me at one point and said “I really like the names of our websites.”  To which I replied, “I really like what we’ve been studying and practicing for the last nine months.”  OK for me it’s been several years.  Take THAT Kasper! :)

Kasper’s stuck on a plane for the next 24 hours and can’t fight back.  Muhaha.  OK, final observation for part one…

PowerPivot is evolving into a “Gateway Drug” in SQL11

That’s right, PowerPivot leads to stronger tools.  If you watched the keynote demos above, you saw something that’s pretty exciting once it sets in.  Remember that the Analysis Services product has existed for over ten years as a toolset that people like me weren’t able to use.  You could learn the query language MDX, but when I discovered that even a simple IF() statement required a PhD, I decided to do other things with my time.

PowerPivot, by contrast, is the kind of canvas on which I can paint.  Keep in mind, however, that PowerPivot is really TWO things:  1) It’s a toolset where someone like me can build models, applications, and reports   and 2) It’s the Vertipaq engine, the thing that makes monstrous compression and performance possible.

In theory, I guess, the PowerPivot toolset – the Excel addin, the DAX language, the integration with SharePoint – was possible without the Vertipaq engine.  Probably would have been too slow and unwieldy to gain much traction, but possible

The real question though was what Microsoft was going to do about the traditional Analysis Services product.  The existing AS product did NOT get equipped with Vertipaq in the 2008 R2 release, so in many ways the BI pros have been quite jealous of us :)  It was obvious that Vertipaq was going to find its way into AS proper in a future release, but it was not clear what the resulting product would look like.

OK, here ya go:  It’s gonna look like PowerPivot.  With an even larger data capacity.  And lots of features that we don’t currently have.  With no SharePoint dependency and no requirement that you embed the models in Excel files. 

And ok, to make it look industrial strength, they’re gonna put it in Visual Studio.  But that’s a minor detail to me, more cosmetic than anything.  I’m told it will support DAX, and generally use all the same sorts of Excel-user-friendly UI gestures that we are used to, as if the Excel addin were dropped into the Visual Studio frame.  No requirement that we change to MDX and other concepts in order to “upsize” into the more powerful future version.

Best news of the conference.

Here it is:

That was posted nearly two months before PowerPivot was released :)

It was available last week but as of today the listing appears to have been taken down, filled.

Which one of you fine folks grabbed it? :)

“A little less blogger nation, a little more action please.”
-The King

Folks, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in PowerPivot these days.  Which ironically has resulted in less writing about PowerPivot.

Quite simply, the release of PowerPivot v1 to MSDN was like a huge starting gun going off.  Suddenly, all that theory became “ok, let’s put it into practice…  on 10 different fronts.”

I’ve been on so many exciting phone calls and web meetings lately.  Lots of very cool customer and partner opportunities.

Oh, and tons of “real” work, too.  Which has left less time for blogging.

But I do love the nifty community we’ve got going here and will never neglect it for long stretches.  So, while I burn the candle at all three ends, I thought I’d share some quick observations and experiences, rapid-fire style:

1. Microblogging has its place – when I don’t have time for a full blog post, I tend to drop something into my Twitter account.  If you’re not a Twitter person, you can see what I mean here.  And if you are a “tweeter",” well, you can click there, too :)
2. I fit 200 Million rows, a 63 GB SQL database, into a 1.3 GB PowerPivot Workbook.  Yeah, no kidding.  50x compression.  And some of the queries against the resulting workbook ran in less than 3 seconds.
3. Another db with 120 Million rows exceeded the 2 GB file size limit – different data set.  See?  There really is no set rule of thumb for how much compression to expect.
4. Removing irrelevant columns can dramatically shrink your file – this is well documented elsewhere, but removing columns from your data before importing them can have a HUGE impact on file size.  It can be surprisingly non-linear, too – remove one column out of ten and file shrinks by 50%.
5. Seems like deleting columns after the fact does NOT shrink the file by as much – I have not verified this scientifically.  But I *seem* to get better file size savings by never importing columns in the first place, as opposed to deleting them post-import.
6. Early response to PivotStream’s new offering on the PowerPivot platform has been VERY positive – yesterday we demo’d a new set of interactive dashboards, built on PowerPivot, to an existing customer who currently is served by one of our other technologies.  It got a big thumbs up, we are moving ahead with a full conversion.  And another customer is likely just a few days away from making a switch from their existing on-premise solution, too.
7. In general, MS might not need viral adoption – when we were building the product we often talked about how bottom-up adoption by Excel users was crucial, that top-down adoption would be slow.  So far, I am seeing zero indication of that.  Everywhere I go, everywhere I demo PowerPivot, the organization I’m talking to does a collective “yes, please.”  Maybe MS could have charged for the client addin after all.  Shhh, don’t tell them.
8. I’m seeing more willingness than in the past to embrace the new Office wave – normally, the new wave of Office products takes years to seep into corporations.  That will still be true in a lot of places.  But about 2/3 of the places I go, I find eager willingness to roll out the new products, even if only on a limited, departmental basis, in order to get PowerPivot.
9. Any serious work on PowerPivot measures requires Notepad++ – seriously, I don’t know how I ever got by without it.
10. Running a PowerPivot server farm is hard work – I have newfound respect for IT pros everywhere.  Don’t go it alone, folks.  We’ve brought some heavyweight talents on board to help out with SharePoint, farm architecture, and Integration Services.  I can’t imagine where we’d be without them.

-rob out

I thought maybe everyone else would be interested, so here ya go, the top 15 industries:

Note #1:  this just reflects people I can recognize – for most visitors, I only see their ISP name.  And anyone who reads strictly over RSS or Email Subscription, I don’t see them either.  But it’s still a reasonable comparison of interest across industries.

Note #2:  this just reflects visitors from the U.S.  Given the amount of manual tagging work involved, I decided not to track the international traffic, which overall outweighs the U.S. by quite a bit.

Any surprises?  For me, here are a few:

1. Healthcare – I had no idea that they were quite this embracing of cutting edge analysis/reporting technology
2. Financial Services – yes, this makes total sense.  But given my perception that most visitors so far have been from the Business Intelligence crowd and not the Excel pro crowd, well, this makes me second guess that assumption.
3. Government – wow, you wouldn’t believe the names I see.  From City/County level all the way up thru Federal.

   
“If you don’t know me by now…  you will never never never know me…”

In honor of PowerPivot v1’s public release, I thought I’d offer up my thoughts on my last six months working with the product. 

Remember, I physically left Redmond in August and then officially left Microsoft in February, but have been putting PowerPivot through its paces that whole time, with a wide variety of data sets and business scenarios.

So in some sense, you can’t really get a closer view of PowerPivot than I have, while still maintaining any sense of neutrality about the product.  So here it is, the honest truth…

It passed the Great Football Project Challenge

When I started the Great Football Project back in October, I really did not know what to expect.  Honestly, I wasn’t sure that it was a great idea – was I going to get 5 days in and discover that PowerPivot simply wasn’t suited to that problem?  There was genuine potential for embarrassment.  But I needed something to blog about, and I was anxious to get started, so I just dove in.

After a few weeks, I was still holding my breath a bit.  I was past the basics but hadn’t really pushed the envelope at all.

At some point though I just stopped wondering.  It wasn’t until recently that I looked back and realized that I was building features, like the Rank measure, that were never in the original project at all. 

I can say now with confidence that PowerPivot can absolutely handle the business logic phase of the football project, which the consultant back in 2006 described as one of the most complex cubes he’d ever seen.

I call that a success.  Note how I specified the “business logic phase?”  That brings me to the next topic…

It is NOT a data cleaner/shaper

OK, this is perhaps obvious since the PowerPivot tables cannot be edited, and there are no features/functions that let you reshape rows.  Yes, you can add calc columns and that often does the trick, but there are other cases (like for instance, removing dupe rows) that PowerPivot can’t do at all.

The whole “shape it in normal Excel and then paste it over to PowerPivot window” workaround is ok for one-off work, or for tables that you don’t expect to change very often.  But like many of you, I am striving to gain the benefits of automatic nightly data refresh that the server provides, and the Excel workaround doesn’t translate to that system at all.

So, even more than ever, you need a clean and properly-shaped data source to start with.  So the first half of the work that the consultant did for the football project in 2006, where the text files were imported into SQL and turned into a decent schema, is still very much required.

For a production system, I don’t think this is a bad thing at all.  It forces you to cooperate with IT (or whoever owns your databases) to give you what you need.  And it forces them to listen to you more clearly, as long as they care about “taming the Excel beast” that is always their favorite thing to complain about :)

For a production system, that cooperation is essential for robust results.  And if it’s not a production system, then yeah, the Excel shaping workaround is great.

“No, it can’t do that.  Oh, wait. Nevermind.  Yeah, it CAN do that.”

Having worked on the product from the beginning, I’m more closely familiar with its limitations than most people.  In some ways that’s an advantage of course – I don’t dive into projects only to find out later that it can’t be done.

Oddly though, so far, knowing the limitations has largely just been a hindrance.  Every time my initial answer was “no, not in PowerPivot v1,” I’ve turned out to be wrong.

I have succeeded using PowerPivot to solve every single real-life problem I’ve encountered in my first six months of using it.

Market basket analysis?  Ranking measures?  Standard deviation?  Many to many relationship problems?  Godawful horrible data sources?  Measures that calc according to different formulas at different levels of the pivot?  Iterating over variables that aren’t even in the view?  PowerPivot has defeated them all.  Well, more accurately, I have defeated them all with PowerPivot.  It’s not like I sit back and watch PowerPivot do its thing.  It is not always easy.  Which brings me to the next point:

Challenging and Rewarding

You know those rare occasions where you suddenly find yourself in the fast lane?  When your brain is forced to expand?  When you are truly challenged, in a good way?

I’m talking about a specific kind of challenge, the good kind.  Not the kind like when you take a new job and are overwhelmed by all the new rules and bureaucracy you have to learn.  And not even the kind when you’re learning most new technologies (HTML and XML come to mind).

The best examples of this “positive challenge” vibe from my life are the ones where I’ve been pushed by a mentor.  A couple of teachers come to mind.  Some specific coworkers as well – Zeke Koch, David Gainer, and Amir Netz most prominently.  Being around those guys everyday basically was a wakeup call – “Rob, you’ve been asleep.  Wake up, it’s time to grow, to be excellent.”

PowerPivot, oddly, has felt like that.  My brain has been expanding again, after a period of stagnation.  More specifically, PowerPivot combined with the problems I’ve been tackling has done this.

And it flows over to other areas too.  Example:  years ago when I needed to estimate the incoming query load for the football stats project, I asked around for advice, got none, and then basically just guessed.  It was a very hollow experience.  Non-excellent.

Then recently, I was presented with essentially the same challenge.  But this time, I didn’t guess, I modeled it:  estimated how many reports (and queries per report) each user would exercise at peak, built a spreadsheet, re-taught myself the Poisson and Binomial functions, and voila – a “users per server” estimate I could believe. 

I’m positive that working with PowerPivot is the difference between the “lazy guess” mentality from before and the “it can be done” mentality today.  I love it :)

Carrot, not stick (but sometimes the carrot is too big for one sitting)

I don’t want you to interpret the above as “PowerPivot is a harsh Pai Mei figure, kicking Rob’s ass day in, day out.”

Nope, I worked with PowerPivot for months, and did things I thought were pretty damn cool, without ever stretching my brain the way I have been lately.  If you’re an Excel pro, you will find PowerPivot to be a very welcoming environment.

Excel veterans:  you will never be forced to do anything uncomfortable with PowerPivot.

In fact you will do amazing things in your first week that will actually deliver greater results than standalone Excel, and it will actually seem easier than normal Excel.  Check out the CALCULATE function and you will see what I mean.

But boy, sooner or later, it will TEMPT you to try something bigger.

You’ll be sitting there one day thinking, “Gee, I sure wish I could build an analysis that showed X.”  And then something hits you – “hey wait, I bet THAT’s what that function I looked at the other day does” or “Didn’t I see a blog post last month about something similar?”

Two hours later, you’re still heads-down over your DAX formulas and relationships, feeling like you’re 30 seconds away from a breakthrough that will change your professional life.

You might not even succeed that first day.  You may have to come back tomorrow with a fresh perspective and a clear head.

And you love it.  Every minute of it.

But that’s when you realize that you have left the reservation.  You are not in Kansas anymore.  Time to take off the training wheels.  Pick your analogy.  Make no mistake – the power of DAX in particular can challenge you immensely.  Jon Udell described the examples I’ve covered here on the blog as “magic,” and he’s right – you won’t pick up everything overnight.  You should be prepared for that.

It’s called learning.  And you’ve almost forgotten what that feels like.  It’s what drew you to Excel in the first place, years ago – that fleeting glimpse of capabilities and the results it could deliver, but also frankly because you were hooked, addicted, to mastering it.

That feeling is back :)

Rapid fire today.

Notepad is a great formula editor

This pains me to admit since I worked on the PowerPivot formula editor, but…  I’ve been cheating on my own creation.  With Notepad, of all things.  Does that mean I’m slumming?

Wait, how did that picture get in here?  How is that remotely relevant to slumming?  Some sort of typo I guess.  (Nazi garb…  ugh).

And did I just compare the PowerPivot formula editor to Sandra Bullock?

Turns out that Notepad lets me do a number of things that I find myself needing:

1. Indenting the formulas – I’ve been doing a lot of complex stuff lately.  Readability has become crucial.
2. Saving formulas – sometimes when I get something done and know I’m going to want to re-use it, I save it in a text file.
3. Find and replace – when re-using a formula, most of the time the column names need to be changed.  How cool is it to do that automatically rather than manually?
4. Bigger font size – better readability.

And the formula editor in PowerPivot supports copy/paste, so you can move back and forth between it and Notepad without issue.  (Somehow I think Jesse’s life might not be so smooth).

Anyway, I highly recommend it.  (Notepad, I mean).  And if anyone has another editor that they’ve tried and liked, let me know.

SharePoint Saturdays – more proof that SharePoint is exploding

What are these people doing on a Saturday morning, sitting in a lecture hall?

They are attending a “SharePoint Saturday” in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  These events are held every couple of weeks in a different location – I see them talked about all the time in Twitter but this was my first time attending one.  Wow!  200 people spent an entire Saturday, unpaid, listening to SharePoint talks?

Do you see what I am talking about when it comes to the SharePoint community?  Ignore SharePoint at your own peril.  Customer-wise, it’s the hottest thing going from MS.

And of course, the gratuitous shot of yours truly delivering the keynote speech, and my PowerPivot session where people were literally sitting in the aisle.

Clearly the SharePoint audience has great taste :)

On a completely serious note, I will say that the SharePoint audience “gets” PowerPivot better, on average, than the Excel or BI audiences.  They see the value of the whole system more readily than the other groups, who often tend to view it through their existing lenses.

Surprising?  Perhaps.  But true.

(Note that this was my first-ever keynote speech, and I was introduced as “the most famous person we could find” – best intro ever!  There’s a joke to be made here about how scrappy the SharePoint community is, something to do with small budgets…  that said, they arranged a luxury suite at the Pistons game, and a huge limo to take all of the speakers to the arena!)

Two weeks after the event and I’m still shaking my head in (happy) disbelief.

One of the marketers suggested that we focus solely on the needs of Word/Outlook/PowerPoint, and not worry about Excel/Access, because “not many people care about those apps, anyway.”

…to which I deadpanned, in my most biting sarcastic tone, “Yeah, totally, only those people who care about numbers.”

In hindsight, that was not my finest moment.  In those days, the marketing org was a bit of a shark tank.  Highly competitive and cliquish, where reputations could turn on a dime.  A dressing-down from the prod-dev org such as the one I delivered, in front of your marketing peers, was not something you could easily recover from.  There was much laughter in the room, by the many, at the expense of the one.

That marketer wasn’t around much longer. 

Like I said, I was in my twenties, and while I believe I am sharper today, I definitely had sharper edges back then.  I hope I would handle that situation more diplomatically today, but I can’t really be certain.  I mean, the nastiness of my reply was exceeded only by the ridiculousness of the original statement :)

OK, that’s a long but hopefully interesting/amusing preamble to the following statement :)

PowerPivot is an international topic

Or…  “Hey look!  People worldwide are interested in numbers!” :)

As always, new MS products get the most initial “noise” in the US, but if you look at a map of recent visitors to this site and the FAQ, you’d never guess that:

I just thought that was neat.  And if I snapped this picture early in the morning before the US wakes up, it would skew even more international.  My free logging service only keeps the most recent 500 hits.

Anyway, I thought you might want to see that.

…and dear ex-MS marketer:  if you happen to be out there today, reading this blog about numbers, please accept my apologies :)

http://visualizeit.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/redesigned-visualizations/

It’s a little bit ironic, of course, that I had to stare at that post for awhile before figuring out what I had to do in order to see the redesigned graphic :)

But I would take these as examples of the chart police doing good, thoughtful work.  And the examples they are dissecting are just laugh-out-loud funny.