Part of the idea came from Nixon’s plumbers the unit he formed to plug leaks. Today we still have that problem.

From the inception of data there has been “holes”. Those holes need to be plugged so we can go about the business of maximizing revenue and making intellingent decisions about expenses.

PowerPivot does that!!!

Put another way, what percentage of spreadsheets do you think are ultimately are fit for some purpose? What percent of data workers across your average organisation contribute a net benefit after their salary and overheads are covered. Do organisations succeed because of all those spreadsheets, or in spite of them.

Sometimes the sum use of my well-honed powerpivot/pivot/sql/vba skills – and my econometrics degree – is to take someone’s large, slow, incomprehensible model and help it reach its inevitably wrong conclusion a heck of a lot faster, with a heck of a lot less manual manipulation of dodgy input along the way.

Often the only gratification I can take from my role is that if someone wants something pretty much irrelevant done, then with my skillset and toolset I can help them achieve it with the minimum efficiency drag on the organisation.

For the majority of organisations, science doesn’t drive most spreadsheets. Dogma does.

While we could do with more people with better tools to help solve the world’s data problems, we also need requisite growth in more/smarter managers capable of asking themselves “Before I make this data monkey crunch all this data, how will I know if the result they come up with is credible? What makes we think we have the data to answer this question? Is this our most pressing question? Will knowing the answer change my behaviour? Do I already know the answer?

Or am I just looking for a safe secure blanket that makes me feel comfortable?

With only a month of PP under my belt i am already finding out how I can use my knowledge of business combined with superior data crunching skills to come up with new ways to analyses large data sets.

i have not seen anything that power pivot does that I could not do in some back ended way in excel (i.e. with pivots, vlookups, and then in some cases doing repivots of a hard code of the pivot results). But it is faster (sometimes) to put together, definitely more flexible, cleaner, better controlled, and processes way quicker than plain excel.

I also like the concept of data analysis. The idea of the business to IT conduit has been something that has been talked about for a while and this is a good example of it coming to fruition.