TechEd / BI Conference Slides

June 17, 2010

I’ve received requests for the slide deck that I presented with Dave Wickert at Microsoft TechEd / BI Conference last week.

Well, here ya go, the whole slide deck right here:

PowerPivot Best Practices from TechEd

Yeah, that’s right.  One slide.

You see, it was an “Interactive” session, which is basically “we jam people in a room and they pepper us with questions for 90 minutes.”  The ground rules given to us were “1-2 slides to set the tone, and then after that it’s all audience-directed.”

Going in, I had mixed feelings about that format.  I mean, there’s a real danger that people won’t be prepared to ask questions, and that the conversation won’t get going.  In fact, in many other Interactive sessions, the speakers decided to ignore the ground rules altogether and simply present.  But it seemed like a potentially entertaining approach, and hey, Dave and I were so busy going in that this minimal preparation thing sounded pretty damn good.  So we rolled the dice.

Well, it turned out EXTREMELY well.  We started 15 minutes early, ran over the end time, and were answering fantastic, high quality questions non stop.  It was awesome.

The bad news is, I don’t have a good way to share that discussion after the fact.  We basically would need to do it again, and sadly, they did not record the session.

So for now, all I can really do is offer the teaser above.

Leave a Comment » | Observations, Trends, and Wild Speculation | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by powerpivotpro

I Risk Serious Bodily Injury vs. the Dutch Menace

May 17, 2010

 
Dutch PowerPivot Menace

“My name is kasper de Jonge. I’m a BI specialist from the Netherlands. I play hoops all my life and I never lose.  Soon I play PowerPivotPro, and the world will see his defeat.”

Yeah folks, you’ve probably all seen Kasper’s guest posts.  But have you heard his voice?  As I’ve said many times, he doesn’t exactly sound like a computer nerd – he sounds more like the creation of some Soviet lab, leftover from the Cold War.

And he plays basketball. 

That’s right.  It’s not enough for Kasper to jump right into PowerPivot and subvert that beautiful American creation for nefarious Continental purposes (ok, actually, the PowerPivot team is at least 50% international in its makeup, but please, let’s not let facts get in the way of trash talk). 

No, he also has to try to take our basketball from us, too.

Well, I can’t let him do that.  Someone has to take a stand.

I recently got word that Kasper will be attending TechEd / MS BI Conference in New Orleans next month.  I issued a challenge.  He accepted.  A one on one basketball game to set the world on its proper course.  Our representatives are busily negotiating the rules.

Kasper plays hoops all the time.  Coaches a women’s team.  Watches NBA games at odd hours via what can only be black market means.  He is the modern basketball equivalent of Ivan Drago.  He is a machine.  He’s about 2-3 inches taller than me – imprecise because it’s so hard to get data from behind the Iron Curtain I guess.

So maybe it’s time for me to get in shape, huh?  I haven’t played hoops in ten years.  I’m about 30 pounds heavier than I’d like to be.  And my hoops shoes…  well, I bought those in 1996 and they still have tread on them.

So this weekend I began my training.  I found the biggest dude I know, my friend Mike, and we played a series of one on one games.  It was ugly – Mike’s taller than me, outweighs me by 60 pounds, and is all around just far more athletic.  I was lucky to steal one game from him, while he annihilated me three times.

Afterwards, we still had enough breath in us to role-play The Ugly Americans:

No Flopping

7 Comments | Hello World / Administrivia, Uncategorized | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by powerpivotpro