I know I’ve been a bit quieter than usual. I’ve been off learning… a lot. Which means that a number of things are piling up that I’d like to share.
Rapid fire today.
Notepad is a great formula editor
This pains me to admit since I worked on the PowerPivot formula editor, but… I’ve been cheating on my own creation. With Notepad, of all things. Does that mean I’m slumming?
Wait, how did that picture get in here? How is that remotely relevant to slumming? Some sort of typo I guess. (Nazi garb… ugh).
And did I just compare the PowerPivot formula editor to Sandra Bullock?
Turns out that Notepad lets me do a number of things that I find myself needing:
- Indenting the formulas – I’ve been doing a lot of complex stuff lately. Readability has become crucial.
- Saving formulas – sometimes when I get something done and know I’m going to want to re-use it, I save it in a text file.
- Find and replace – when re-using a formula, most of the time the column names need to be changed. How cool is it to do that automatically rather than manually?
- Bigger font size – better readability.
And the formula editor in PowerPivot supports copy/paste, so you can move back and forth between it and Notepad without issue. (Somehow I think Jesse’s life might not be so smooth).
Anyway, I highly recommend it. (Notepad, I mean). And if anyone has another editor that they’ve tried and liked, let me know.
SharePoint Saturdays – more proof that SharePoint is exploding
What are these people doing on a Saturday morning, sitting in a lecture hall?
They are attending a “SharePoint Saturday” in Ann Arbor, Michigan. These events are held every couple of weeks in a different location – I see them talked about all the time in Twitter but this was my first time attending one. Wow! 200 people spent an entire Saturday, unpaid, listening to SharePoint talks?
Do you see what I am talking about when it comes to the SharePoint community? Ignore SharePoint at your own peril. Customer-wise, it’s the hottest thing going from MS.
And of course, the gratuitous shot of yours truly delivering the keynote speech, and my PowerPivot session where people were literally sitting in the aisle.
Clearly the SharePoint audience has great taste 🙂
On a completely serious note, I will say that the SharePoint audience “gets” PowerPivot better, on average, than the Excel or BI audiences. They see the value of the whole system more readily than the other groups, who often tend to view it through their existing lenses.
Surprising? Perhaps. But true.
(Note that this was my first-ever keynote speech, and I was introduced as “the most famous person we could find” – best intro ever! There’s a joke to be made here about how scrappy the SharePoint community is, something to do with small budgets… that said, they arranged a luxury suite at the Pistons game, and a huge limo to take all of the speakers to the arena!)
Two weeks after the event and I’m still shaking my head in (happy) disbelief.
