“I don’t always use spreadsheets, but when I do, I prefer… PowerPivot.”
-P Kumar
We Have a Waldo Contest Winner!
OK, I’ve never met P Kumar. Most people haven’t. He is a mysterious man, preferring to go by his first initial only, much like the famous J Allard at Microsoft. P probably looks nothing like the picture above. But he is, quite simply…
The Most Tenacious Man in the World.
When I posted the Where’s Waldo PowerPivot Contest, I knew it was challenging. I half expected the winner would be someone who had already stumbled upon the answer, rather than someone who went looking for it. I mean, I had stumbled upon it myself just a few days prior.
But this did not deter P. Nor did the fact that he had never installed PowerPivot, client or server. Off he went.
I kinda get the impression that P barely slept for 48 hours, performing the equivalent of a depth-first-search traversal of every pixel in the product. You can get a play-by-play account of his efforts here in the comments thread.
Anyway, here’s the answer:
Yeah, it’s in the usage monitoring features of PowerPivot for SharePoint. Those dashboard views are rendered in Excel Services from workbooks created by the PowerPivot team, and they accidentally left in a chart from their own internal testing of the product.
You can even create your own workbooks as custom views, which I have been doing lately to filter Pivotstream employees out (so we just see the activity of our customers).
Congratulation to P, the most tenacious person I’ve encountered in a long time. He truly deserves the prize. Now P, I expect you to do wonderful things with that software ok? Please report back so we can track your exploits further 
An old joke comes to mind
This reminds me of one of my favorite old jokes – “How do you hunt an elephant?” Each profession’s quirks are revealed by their approach. In particular, the approach of computer programmers seems relevant:
The full list can be found here.
hey Rob, Thank you.
Yeah I did have couple of sleepless(nearly) nights but think it was all well worth it now knowing the outcome. I actually did install everything from scratch and the first challenge was to get the feel of it more than anything else.
Oh and one more thing, I was worried that by the time I finish typing my full first name here, someone else will manage to find the answer
. hence the initial only.
I am definitely going to make some good use of the software(s), and keep you updated.
Thank you again.
Regards,
P
Rob:
I’m not going to comment on your Waldo thing (but I definitely am going to drill down on that) but I absolutely love your reference to “The Most Interesting Man In The World”. We should all aspire to be that guy – I can tell you do too.
Dick