My Two Goals for This Book
Fundamentally of course, this book is intended to train you on PowerPivot. It captures the techniques I’ve learned from three years of teaching PowerPivot (in person and on my blog), as well as applying it extensively in my everyday work.
Unsurprisingly, then, the contents herein are very much instructional – a “how to” book if ever there was one.
But I also want you to understand how to maximize PowerPivot’s impact on your career. It isn’t just a better way to do PivotTables. It isn’t just a way to reduce manual effort. It’s not just a better formula engine.
Even though I worked on the first version of PowerPivot while at Microsoft, I had no idea how impactful it would be until about two years after I left the company. I had to experience it in the real world to see its full potential, and even then it took some time to overwhelm my skeptical nature (my Twitter profile now describes me as “skeptic turned High Priest.”)
This is the rare technology that can (and will) fundamentally change the lives of millions of people – it has more in common with the invention of the PC than with the invention of, say, the VCR.
The PC might be a particularly relevant example actually. At a prestigious Seattle high school in the early 1970’s, Bill Gates and Paul Allen discovered a mutual love for programming, but there was no widespread demand for programmers at that point. Only when the first PC (the Altair) was introduced was there an opportunity to properly monetize their skills. Short version: they founded Microsoft and became billionaires.
But zoom out and you’ll see much more. Thousands of people became millionaires at Microsoft alone (sadly, yours truly missed that boat by a few years). Further, without the Altair, there would have been no IBM PC, no Apple, no Mac, no Steve Jobs. No iPod, no iPhone, no Appstore. No Electronic Arts, no Myst. No World of Warcraft. The number of people who became wealthy as a result of the PC absolutely dwarfs the number of people who had anything to do with inventing the PC itself!
I think PowerPivot offers the same potential wealth-generation effect to Excel users as the PC offered budding programmers like Gates and Allen: your innate skills remain the same but their value becomes many times greater. Before diving into the instructional stuff in Chapters 2 and beyond, Chapter 1 will summarize your exciting new role in the changing world.
And like many things in my life, the story starts with a movie reference