PowerPivotPro

Excellent, welcome!  Here are some quick links that catch you up on what’s going on here.  Have fun!

Getting Started

1. What is PowerPivot – Introduction to what it’s all about.
2. Top 5 PowerPivot Benefits for Excel pros – guest post on the official Microsoft Excel blog, explaining why PowerPivot will change the daily lives of Excel pros forever. 
3. And a followup post here on how PowerPivot makes your formulas “portable” for the first time.  Part Two of that post is located here.
4. Meet the Pros – Who are we and why this site?
5. Download PowerPivot – Get PowerPivot for yourself (the Excel component is free, and there’s even a free trial of Excel 2010), plus tips on installing it
6. Your First PowerPivot Workbook – Want a jumpstart?  Grab the workbook that I created for my “temperature mashup demo.”

Case Studies and In-Depth Examples

1. The Great Football Project – where I convert a pre-existing professionally-built BI database to PowerPivot.
2. Temperature/Sales Mashup Demo – where I combine sales data with temperature statistics off of the web to do something truly unexpected.
   1. And part two is here
3. Extranet Analytics Using PowerPivot – how Pivotstream uses PowerPivot to serve the retail, pharma, and consumer packaged goods industries.
4. 48-Hour Case Study from Bing – one of my friends who works for Bing adopted PowerPivot for internal bug tracking in literally 48 hours.

The FAQ

The Great PowerPivot FAQ is a collaboration by members of Microsoft as well as some of the leading experts in the community.

Observations and Trends

1. Observations from PowerPivot Training and Consulting – some of my reactions from teaching other organizations how to optimally utilize PowerPivot, and their reactions.
   1. Why Training and Consulting Should Be Mixed – based on experience with clients, I explain why I think this is the best approach.
   2. Why traditional BI doesn’t deliver the “Intelligence” – and why PowerPivot does.
2. SharePoint’s Emergence as Platform – top 5 list that caught me completely by surprise.
   1. Observations #2 and #3 here
   2. #4 and #5 here
3. PowerPivot’s impact on BI Pros – discussion amongst several BI professionals about whether PowerPivot means less or more opportunities for them.
4. Forrester Top 10 – observations from a savvy analyst, and my take on how PowerPivot fits into those.
5. Putting the “Intelligence” in Business Intelligence – how PowerPivot puts the human intellect back into the BI equation without compromising reliability.
   1. Part Two
   2. Part Three
   3. Related:  Microsoft Announces New Programming Language XL#
6. 1,300 Measures – Nightmare or Utopia?  -  A somewhat controversial example of what happens when the business users gain access to more powerful tools.