PowerPivotPro

I had a great day yesterday …..  I drove for three hours (using my new Garmin to get me where I needed) for a lunch at Tony Packo’s original restaurant in Toledo, Ohio.  What a great place for Hot Dogs and Chili !!  A Man’s restaurant with “REAL Man’s Food”  IMHO (glad Wendy doesn’t read this – yet). Then I drove back for three hours.

But it wasn’t just the food that made the trip worth it, it was actually a meeting to chat about PowerPivot with Bill Jelen (Mr. Excel) and Rob Collie (Mr. PowerPivotPro) who ran over from the Cleveland area, for two hours face to face rather than on-line.  In addition to realizing Rob and I HAD in fact met in Redmond it was nice to finally meet Bill. 

It was also extremely valuable for me to get the perspective of different people with a professional commitment to Excel and to see how others are thinking about how PowerPivot can not only be a winner for users in its own right, but also how it could end up being a driver for innovation and growth of Excel in general once again elevating Excel as a “legitimate” tool for business reporting.  We talked, among other things, about simply how cool and capable Excel really is and how much it (and those who take the time to REALLY learn it) can accomplish.

Ironically I have been working all day today on a “little” Excel application and am once again surprising myself at how cool the stuff I’m doing with Excel really is….  how it pays to stand back and appreciate what this technology can REALLY do !!

I suggest that anyone who comes here should add www.powerpivotpro.com to their regular visitations (or RSS Feeds) (and http://www.mrexcel.com/ too of course) and that we should all get a download of not only the Office 2010 beta but also the PowerPivot bits too…

More to come when time allows.

Dick