Are you an Excel power user, but feel that you are lacking the right level of recognition for this achievement? If so, then Microsoft wants to see what you’re made of!
Over the next few weeks, Donald Farmer from the PowerPivot team here at Microsoft will be issuing Business Intelligence challenges for you to solve using the new data analysis add-on PowerPivot for Excel. And there are great prizes for the winners (if you happen to be a resident in the US) in the aptly named Alpha Geek Challenge.
So now is your chance to pit your wits against your peers, or just to get a deeper hands-on understanding of how PowerPivot can help you achieve deeper business insight and shorter decision cycles by enabling powerful analysis on truly massive amounts of data from virtually any data source – including, of course, your ERP data.
And all of this using the familiar Excel tools and features that you have honed your geek skills on in the past, as well as other new and improved Excel 2010 features such as Slicers, PivotTables, and conditional formatting.
In addition, your IT Department can use PowerPivot for SharePoint as a secure and reliable platform for sharing and collaborating on user-generated data models and analyses, while avoiding the spreadsheet snowball effect that so effectively silos data in many organizations.
The PowerPivot add-ons work across Microsoft Dynamics, SQL Server 2008 R2, Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010.
You can check out the Alpha Geek Challenge here. Or if you want to keep your geek status under wraps for a while yet, but still want to check out what PowerPivot can offer your business, you can read, watch, download and get hands-on here.
Ross Thorpe
Microsoft Dynamics Product Marketing