Very busy week for me. Fortunately Miguel is at the ready with another guest post.
It occurs to me that we’ve now had guest posts from the US, the UK, Holland, Canada, and Panama. That’s pretty cool.
Miguel told me that I was going to LOVE the first picture in this post. And I do. But I must say that, once I saw the title, I expected something along the lines of the picture at the right. The picture below is better.
OK, over to Miguel…
Figure shows the population distribution for Panama in 2010 Made Entirely in Excel!
If you read my latest guest post at Powerpivotpro’s blog, you’ll know that I’m working on a personal project trying to get a more visual aproach of the latest census Data for the country of Panama (where I’m from and I currently live in).
Hi folks, welcome back Over the holidays, Kasper submitted a post – yes, THAT Kasper. Appropriately for the year 2013, it is focused on Excel 2013. Not many people have 2013 on their desktops yet (even me really – I just have one “test” laptop running it), but over the course of this year I’ll be slowing “rotating” Excel 2013 topics onto the blog.
Anyway, Kasper and I decided to “hold” his post until today so that everyone sees it.
Over to Kasper…
“I’ll be back” – Kasper de Jonge
Ok its been a while since I blogged an actual scenario here on PowerPivotPro but here is another one . Its that time at the end of the year and folks here at Microsoft are out enjoying their vacation so lots of meetings get cancelled, this gives me the opportunity to do one of the the things I love, helping users of our products get the solution they need and write some blog posts .
A few days ago I met a internal user who had 3 million rows of occurrences, products and dates in a SQL database and wanted to get some insights out of it, preferably in a highly visual output. We are fortunate here at Microsoft that we always get to play with the latest bits, so we have access to Excel 2013 that includes Power View.
In this blog post we will look at how we can show a top 10 list of best selling products in Power View and how we can solve a long tail problem that will allow us to visualize only the top best selling products in a chart and ignore the rest. I know these things are pretty straightforward in Excel (if you know where to find it) but it needs the help of DAX in Power View.
***UPDATE – FULL: Wave one filled up fast, no need for 48 hours. We actually went over 100 during the night and hit about 130. We’re letting all of those in, but are taking down the signup form now.
Stay tuned for news about Wave Two
If Ebenezer Scrooge Were Alive Today, He’d Use PowerPivot. And He’d Love This Post. (Believe it or not this is an original image I commissioned ten years ago)
Taking my “High Priest” Role VERY Seriously
There are a few themes that I just keep hammering on, month after month. Most of those revolve around the stunning new future opening up for Excel Pros. I believe every thing I say about that stuff. It is REAL.
One of the biggest and most transformational changes is this: taking your workbooks to the web. Workbooks were being emailed around back when Roxette topped the worldwide music charts. PowerPivot workbooks published to a server are a very, VERY different experience, one that inspires MUCH more respect from the person consuming them.
Short Version: Free Forever for Lighter Workloads
This week, Pivotstream is launching something that I’ve been dreaming about for a long time: a way for you (yes YOU, dear reader) to harness the power of PowerPivot server (publishing workbooks as interactive web apps)… for free.
Not a trial. This is more of a Dropbox-style model where lighter usage is completely free, and you only pay if you want more capacity. I want to remove any barriers I can so that you can experience what I’m talking about (without bankrupting my company of course), and I think we’ve figured out how to do that. But before I get into details, let me show you something.
Just Add Upload
Thanks to a recent focus group I recruited here on the blog, I learned that many people expect there to be some sort of intensive conversion process – it seems like you would need to put a lot of work into a workbook before it becomes an interactive web application like the ones on our demo site.
So I recorded a video showing that it’s much, MUCH simpler than that. Just upload
Upload and Share – Short Video Illustrating an Even Shorter Process (I recommend watching in HD and Fullscreen)
Benefits to Excel Pro
I didn’t have time to cover this in such a short video, so here’s a quick table comparing the old way to the new way, through the eyes of you, the Excel Pro:
My First Real Experiment with Power View – Built From a PowerPivot V2 XLSX!
(Running on our New V2 Cloud PowerPivot Platform)
Lots of Work Pays Off
The #1 question I hear every day is “when will Pivotstream offer support for V2 on their cloud platform?” And in fact, that’s maybe the #1 question that I ask of the team every day, too.
There’s a lot of demand for it, given all the new bells and whistles in the V2 release. But we’re no longer a fledgling little operation – we can’t just upgrade everyone overnight. Actually, we could, but that would be irresponsible – we have to make sure none of our customers get burned in the process, and huge software releases like V2 have a tendency to be… finicky. If we upgrade everyone and things start breaking, saying “it’s Microsoft’s fault” is not an answer – we have to hold ourselves to a higher bar.
So our V2 cloud platform is a completely separate and parallel investment – new hardware, new domains, new base URL’s, etc. A lot of time and money, in other words. So if you’ve been wondering “what the heck are they waiting for,” now you know.
Intro from Rob
Posted by Miguel Escobar 
Over the holidays, Kasper submitted a post – yes, 
. Its that time at the end of the year and folks here at Microsoft are out enjoying their vacation so lots of meetings get cancelled, this gives me the opportunity to do one of the the things I love, helping users of our products get the solution they need and write some blog posts 
