PowerPivotPro

Today’s Scene  (Just add a Foot of Snow)

An obsessive and intrusive habit

Quick anecdote.  For a couple of years now I have been accosting people in public places when I see them using Excel.  On an airplane?  In an airport?  In a doctor’s office waiting room?  You aren’t safe in any of those places.

If you’re using Excel, some weirdo is gonna walk up to you and ask you two questions:

1. Do you use PivotTables?
2. (If Yes) Do you use PowerPivot?

The first answer tends to be “Yes” about a third of the time.  That’s disproportionately high relative to the broader population, in which only about 5-10% of people use pivots.  There’s a selection bias in play here of course, because someone who uses Excel enough that it’s on their screen when I walk by is more likely than average to be an Excel pro, and therefore more likely than average to use pivots.

But for two years the second answer has always been “no.”  I then explain that they should be, they express shame, they promise to check it out.  Sometimes they even get a demo.

Until Today!

Recall that just a few days ago, I predicted this would be the year where we start running into PowerPivot via random personal connections and conversations.

This morning, at 10:15 eastern time, at the Starbucks on Cedar and Fairmount in Cleveland Heights OH, I noticed a well-dressed man sitting with his laptop, engrossed in Excel 2007 or 2010 (couldn’t tell, just saw the Ribbon).

Being a “work from home day,” I took stock of my own ensemble:  Unshaven?  Check.  T-shirt and tennis shoes under a coat covered in dog fur?  Check.  Beanie-style snowboarding hat with a pom-pom ball on top?  Check.

Perfect.  I moved in for the kill.

I’m positive he thought I was going to ask him for money or something, and the smile that came over his face when he heard the pivot question was one of sheer joy and relief

OK, so “yes” he uses pivots.  Now for the second question, the one that engenders shame when the person has to say “no” to a question that so clearly, I think they should say “yes” to… 

ME:  “Do you use PowerPivot?”
HIM:  “No, I don’t, but my team does.  We use a lot of SharePoint.”

Quite the rollercoaster in that sentence.  In sequence, my brain flashes the following reactions:

1. “He said no.  Yep, just like every other random sample to date.”
2. “Whoa, his team does???  Wait, he doesn’t know what PowerPivot is does he?  He’s bluffing!”
3. “Hold it hold it!  Anyone who follows up a PowerPivot question with a SharePoint reference actually DOES know it.  And quite well!”

Fantastic.  I let him get back to work rather than chatting him up.  Took some serious willpower.

Coming Soon to an… Everywhere Near You

(OK so I said this post was coming on January 2nd, but really I meant the 3rd since today is Tuesday.  Apologies for being so late in the day though). 

Well it’s been a refreshing holiday season.  I actually did a lot less work than I planned.  That’s mostly a good thing, but I committed to a bunch of new things too, so I better have fully-charged batteries rolling into the new year.

So, why do I think 2012 will be the year of PowerPivot?  Well, the first reason is that…  2013 isn’t here yet .  Because I am quite certain that every year will be a bigger year for PowerPivot than the previous.  For a long time.

But 2012 will be the first year where we all start running into PowerPivot in places where we weren’t looking for it.  I certainly see plenty of PowerPivot adoption in places that we all might consider “unlikely,” but I find out about those cases because those people reach out to Pivotstream for assistance.  It’s not like I’m stumbling on it.

But I think that changes in 2012.  I think we will start running into PowerPivot through random personal connections, because its adoption has just reached that point.

I’m increasingly meeting “High Priests” coming downstream while I am paddling upstream.  Lately I keep finding myself on so-called “sales” calls with people who have been using PowerPivot for awhile and glimpsing its potential, and THEY start telling ME why they think PowerPivot is a game-changer.  Not only that, but their reasons, their “talking points” if you will, are as crisp as anything I have ever captured on the blog.  That certainly gets my attention.

Reason #1:  My Uncle-in-Law Savvies the PowerPivot?

A funny thing happened over the holidays.  My wife and I were visiting her family in Chicago, and the usual “so what are you up to these days” type of holiday party chatter ensued.  Her uncle owns his own video editing business, and when he heard the word “PowerPivot,” he said:

         “Hey I edited a video on PowerPivot last year!”

I am not accustomed to this sort of thing yet.  People who aren’t spreadsheet or SharePoint or BI pros really have no reason to know about PowerPivot at this point.  So my response was naturally something like “are you SURE it’s PowerPivot?  Was it computer related?”  Turns out, it was an Intel video from TechEd 2010, which I even attended:

Not the best video in terms of content, but the editing is SUPERB

OK, yeah, it’s from a year and a half ago, so it’s not exactly a sign of a recent tipping point. 

But it’s still my first-ever completely random, “normal, non-number-crunching-person has a connection to PowerPivot” moment.  I expect to have many more of these in 2012.

Reason #2:  Blog Stats on the Rise, with an Exponential Flavor

PowerPivotPro.com enjoys a decent page ranking in the search engines, as evidenced by a quick google of the term “PowerPivot.”  As such, I tend to regard traffic here as a decent indicator of overall PowerPivot adoption and awareness.

I’ve guarded these stats closely for a long time now (mostly out of insecurity, and not knowing what counts as “good” traffic for a blog).  But the trend I have been watching is interesting, and I want to provide some detail.

The blog had its first full month in November 2009, about 6 months before PowerPivot v1 was released.  Here is a graph of total page views per month going back to the beginning:

PowerPivotPro Monthly Blog Views Since Inception

Notice how the little orange trendline doesn’t actually keep pace with the recent traffic numbers?  That’s because we’ve seen an inflection point this Fall.  A sharp rise.

Curious as to what this would look like just over the last eighteen months, I filtered it down:

PowerPivotPro Monthly Blog Views Since PowerPivot V1 Release Date

That’s probably a better indication of trend, since those 18 months roughly correspond to the time since PowerPivot v1 was released.

Now if we extend the trendline out another six months into the future, we see that we’re trending toward 35,000 a month by June, about 3x what it was the same time in 2010.

Same as Previous Chart But Projected Six Months Into the Future

Lastly, it’s instructive to look at the data in “year over year” fashion:

PowerPivotPro Monthly Blog Views Since Inception, Year over Year

See how the gain from is bigger from 2010-2011 than it was from 2009-2010?  That’s an example of exponential growth:  the audience is growing at a rate that is proportional to the existing size of said audience.  

One of the hallmarks of exponential growth is that it tends to seem slow at first, because the size of the population is also small at that point.  Later, once it has a good foothold, it surprises you with startling increases in a short period.  This is literally the way that viruses and bacteria multiply, and when something spreads “virally,” it follows this sort of a curve.

For examples of this, see my reference to the “magic eyedropper” story near the end of a previous post, and here’s an article that explains how plants/gardens follow the same sort of growth curve.

Typical Example of Linear vs. Exponential Growth:
Note How the Exponential Curve Seemingly Goes Nowhere for Awhile,
Then Starts to Pick Up, Then Goes Literally “Viral”

Reason #2a:  A Past Observation by Bill Baker

I was at a TDWI conference in San Francisco about seven or eight years ago where I attended a panel discussion.  Bill Baker was one of the three panelists.  Bill was asked if he thought a particular technology (I think it was web services like SOAP) was going to be a big deal or a one-hit wonder.

I really liked his answer, which was to point out that we often tend to OVER-estimate a new technology’s impact when we look ONE year into the future, but we tend to UNDER-estimate its impact FIVE years in the future.  In other words, “hot” technologies tend to “disappoint” at the one year mark, but by the five year mark, they often have quietly popped up everywhere.

Today, it struck me that Bill’s answer is really just the anecdotal way of describing exponential growth:  something that spreads by word of mouth, by example, by experimentation, and by proving itself the hard way, rather than being adopted on command.  I’m pretty sure Microsoft wishes it could command this one, but it won’t have to.

OK, on Thursday we have a killer new post by the esteemed Mr. Churchward.  Stay tuned

Homer Creates a Perfect World… 
Except it Has no Donuts

Imagine a modern world without spreadsheets

Here’s a story I find myself telling a lot these days:  imagine a world in which all of today’s technology exists except spreadsheets.  In that world, we have all of the computing hardware, software, and networking of 2011, but for some reason, spreadsheets have just never been invented.

That would be a very interesting place, and very different from our world.  The evolution of the spreadsheet and the evolution of the PC are largely the same story in our world – they both spread in parallel, starting in the early 1980’s.  It took about 10 years for both to become common in the workplace, with each one driving adoption of the other.

Release the hounds (of Excel 2000)!

Now imagine that suddenly, Microsoft released Excel into that world.  (Or Lotus released 1-2-3).  And not version one of Excel, but something like Excel 2000 or later.

Here’s what I think would happen:

1) It would take time for spreadsheets to reach broad adoption.  People would need to hear about this new invention.  They would need to comprehend the value they offer.  They’d need to overcome their natural skepticism about the latest “next best thing.”  And they’d need to learn how to use them.

2) But it would NOT take as long as it did in the 1980’s.  Remember, the PC itself wasn’t widely adopted when spreadsheets were first invented, and that was a big impediment to their adoption.  But in our 2011 imaginary world, the PC is already everywhere – a world primed for more rapid adoption.

3) The early adopters would enjoy a tremendous advantage.  It would seem like magic to them.  Their competitive advantages would dwarf those enjoyed by the early adopters of the 1980’s.  The CPU and RAM of 2011 desktop hardware combined with the advanced feature set of even Excel 2000 would deliver a transformational capability.

OK, so what’s the point of this thought experiment?

PowerPivot’s Release in 2010 is Just as Impactful

The #1 reason why I’ve been telling that story above is this: I think PowerPivot’s impact on today’s world will eventually be judged to be as every bit as big as the invention of spreadsheets themselves.

Now, as Vincent Vega would say, that’s a bold statement.  But you have to consider the source here (me) – I’m not a Microsoft fanboy.  My employment at Microsoft over 13 years jaded me more than stoking my religion.  In fact, in the “ask the experts” session this weekend at SharePoint Saturday, I was clearly the most cynical panelist.  (Come see me in person to see what I’m talking about).

So when someone like me says something bold like that, I encourage you to pay attention.  I was NOT saying (or expecting) that degree of impact when I was at MS, and I was not saying it when I started this blog.  It’s really just been the past year – after many months of seeing it for myself.

The Magic Eyedropper:  How PowerPivot is Spreading

How about speed of adoption?  I think it’s going to be just like Excel 2000 landing on our imaginary world.  There’s another relevant thought experiment that I love, but I didn’t come up with this one.  Here it is, copy/pasted from another website:

Suppose I had a magic eye dropper and I placed a single drop of water in the middle of your left hand. The magic part is that this drop of water is going to double in size every minute.

At first nothing seems to be happening, but by the end of a minute, that tiny drop is now the size of two tiny drops.  After another minute, you now have a little pool of water that is slightly smaller in diameter than a dime sitting in your hand.  After six minutes, you have a blob of water that would fill a thimble.

Now suppose we take our magic eye dropper to Fenway Park, and, right at 12:00 p.m. in the afternoon, we place a magic drop way down there on the pitcher’s mound.

To make this really interesting, suppose that the park is watertight and that you are handcuffed to one of the very highest bleacher seats.

My question to you is, “How long do you have to escape from the handcuffs?” When would it be completely filled? In days? Weeks? Months? Years? How long would that take?  I’ll give you a few seconds to think about it.

The answer is, you have until 12:49 on that same day to figure out how you are going to get out of those handcuffs. In less than 50 minutes, our modest little drop of water has managed to completely fill Fenway Park.

Now let me ask you this – at what time of the day would Fenway Park still be 93% empty space, and how many of you would realize the severity of your predicament?

Any guesses? The answer is 12:45. If you were squirming in your bleacher seat waiting for help to arrive, by the time the field is covered with less than 5 feet of water, you would now have less than 4 minutes left to get free.

I’ve recently seen traffic to this blog jump to double its longstanding average.  I’ve seen the post frequency on LinkedIn quadruple.  Incoming requests for HostedPowerPivot have also quadrupled.  Every metric like that is telling a similar story.

Is it 12:45 yet?  Probably not.  But I’d say it’s around 12:30.

 
A few days ago I mentioned I was writing a series of posts for CIMA Insight, which is the monthly web magazine of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants – an audience that knows Excel quite well but probably has yet to discover PowerPivot.

Given that this series is starting from scratch, with an introductory post, it is mostly “old news” for readers here.  But there are perhaps some high level explanatory points that are new.  For instance, this diagram I sketched to explain the traditional tradeoffs between spreadsheets and formal BI: – a decision that results in impractically high costs sooner or later:

PowerPivot, of course, provides a curve that shares the low startup costs of spreadsheets AND the long-term maintainability and robustness of formal BI.  Literally, PowerPivot is the end of that “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.

To read the whole (brief) part one of the series, please click here.

As always, I’m interested in your comments.