Friday Bonus: PowerPivot Discovers a New Form of Communication in the Animal World, Makes Headlines in Science!

March 8, 2013

 
image

A Sampling of Headlines From the Past 24 Hours Smile

Remember the Sniffing Project?

If you were reading this blog a year ago, you may remember the “peak detection,” “fuzzy overlapping timeframes,” and “converting from peaks to frequencies” posts.

Among other things, that series gave us one of my favorite pivots of all time:

image

Those posts stemmed from my work with my neighbor, Dr. Daniel Wesson (I like to call us “Datasmith and Wesson” when we collaborate, btw).

He was hot on the trail of something AMAZING, but I wasn’t able to share the results until now:

He’s discovered a new form of communication between animals.  (Well, the communication method isn’t new to the animals themselves, but science wasn’t aware of it.)  And the world’s news and science sites are abuzz with it.  You could say they are….  hyperventilating?  (Said in best Dr. Evil voice, with pinky finger raised).

Read the rest of this entry »


PowerPivot Beats IBM/Cognos: Textbook Example of ROI (and Going Beyond “Informal BI”)

June 21, 2012

 
My Favorite PowerPivot Case Study to Date

We recently completed our second joint case study with Microsoft, describing the work we did with one of our Cloud PowerPivot clients, Building Materials Distributors.

This was a fun project to watch.  And that’s mostly what I did, was watch.  Because the good folks at BMD did the work – all we did was give them the environment in which they could do it.

A Quick Read, and Good Justification!

It’s basically a one-page case study and a very quick read.  I don’t want to just duplicate it here, so I highly encourage you to go read it real quick, then come back here for the points I want to emphasize.

Click here to view the case study

imageI know, you don’t want to go read some boring case study.  Clicking links to other sites (especially “official” sites) really kinda sucks in general, I know that.  It’s more fun, frankly, to read sites where the author is allowed to use the word “sucks.”

But I think this one will come in handy for PowerPivot Pros who are advocating broader adoption at their companies.  You may know in your bones that PowerPivot will revolutionize the way your organization operates, but convincing others (especially non-Excel pros) can be tricky.  And let’s face it, blog posts on a site that uses the word “sucks” and features pictures of Samuel Jackson aren’t the most convincing evidence are they?

But big money savings, quick deployments times, and successful examples of PowerPivot “defeating” much more complex and expensive solutions, all packaged up in an official case study – that counts.

The Points I Want to Emphasize

Quickly and succinctly, here are the four things I would like to call out…

Read the rest of this entry »