“I don’t always use spreadsheets, but when I do, I prefer… PowerPivot.”
-P Kumar
We Have a Waldo Contest Winner!
OK, I’ve never met P Kumar. Most people haven’t. He is a mysterious man, preferring to go by his first initial only, much like the famous J Allard at Microsoft. P probably looks nothing like the picture above. But he is, quite simply…
The Most Tenacious Man in the World.
When I posted the Where’s Waldo PowerPivot Contest, I knew it was challenging. I half expected the winner would be someone who had already stumbled upon the answer, rather than someone who went looking for it. I mean, I had stumbled upon it myself just a few days prior.
But this did not deter P. Nor did the fact that he had never installed PowerPivot, client or server. Off he went.
I kinda get the impression that P barely slept for 48 hours, performing the equivalent of a depth-first-search traversal of every pixel in the product. You can get a play-by-play account of his efforts here in the comments thread.
Anyway, here’s the answer:
Yeah, it’s in the usage monitoring features of PowerPivot for SharePoint. Those dashboard views are rendered in Excel Services from workbooks created by the PowerPivot team, and they accidentally left in a chart from their own internal testing of the product.
You can even create your own workbooks as custom views, which I have been doing lately to filter Pivotstream employees out (so we just see the activity of our customers).
Congratulation to P, the most tenacious person I’ve encountered in a long time. He truly deserves the prize. Now P, I expect you to do wonderful things with that software ok? Please report back so we can track your exploits further 🙂
An old joke comes to mind
This reminds me of one of my favorite old jokes – “How do you hunt an elephant?” Each profession’s quirks are revealed by their approach. In particular, the approach of computer programmers seems relevant:
The full list can be found here.
