Best Places to Trick or Treat Using Excel Power Map

Check out this great use of Excel 2013 Power Map to find the best places to trick or treat:

Does A-Z Sort Speed VLOOKUP?

Does sorting your VLOOKUP table A-Z speed up the VLOOKUP calc time? No! Instead, try sorting by popularity. Or, use Charles Williams trick with 2 True VLOOKUPs.

Live MrExcel Seminar in Daytona Beach or Ft Myers

Bill Jelen returns to doing live seminars with 2 events in Daytona Beach and Ft Myers Florida.

Local Power Pivot User Groups

Do you want to learn more about Power Pivot? Rob Collie is trying to gauge interest of people who would join a local user group. Drop in at his page to register your city.

http://www.powerpivotpro.com/excel-power-pivot-user-groups/

 

 

Even Excel 2013 Non-Commercial Includes Power Pivot

My contacts at Microsoft have confirmed that any stand-alone boxed version of Excel 2013 will include Power Pivot.

While Microsoft sees this as a single SKU, Amazon.com actually carries three such SKUs:

• A non-commercial version of Excel. List Price $80. Currently less than $72. Sold as a key card here.
• A stand-alone Excel 2013. List Price $109. Currently $98 as a key card. Sold here.
• A stand-alone Excel 2013. List Price $109. Currently $99.99 for instant download. Sold here.

The non-commercial license is not to be used in revenue activities. It might be great for students or people who want to track millions of records around the home.

Power Pivot and Power View 2013 Now Included with Excel 2013 Standalone Box Edition

Big breaking news today from Microsoft. You can finally buy Power Pivot 2013 in a box.

Starting today, if you purchase the full boxed edition of Excel 2013 (currently $98 at Amazon.com), the download will include Excel 2013, plus Power Pivot 2013 and Power View 2013. It will presumably include the rest of the Power BI stack once those get released. If you previously purchased the Excel 2013 boxed edition, at the next update of Office, you will get the full version.

Why is this big news? Since February 2013, there was no way to buy a boxed edition from a retailer that included Power Pivot. Everything you could buy at Amazon did not include Power Pivot. You either had to license Office 365 Pro Plus at $12 a month, or go through Volume Licensing (E3 or E4) package to get Power Pivot. This was incredibly frustrating, since Power Pivot is so powerful, particularly for people without big I.T. departments.

Note that as of today, none of the boxed editions of Office 2013 include Power Pivot. It is only the boxed edition of Excel. This is roughly symmetrical with Excel 2003, when the boxed edition of Excel 2003 included some high-end features that were not in Office 2003 Standard.

To purchase from Amazon.com, follow this link.

Update Aug 20, 2013: Microsoft confirmed that the $79 non-commercial version of Excel *does* include Power Pivot. This SKU is for home use.

For confirmation of this story, see this Microsoft blog post which was edited today to include Excel 2013 Stand-alone.

Registration Closing Aug 16 for PowerPivot Pro School

Rob Collie from PowerPivotPro.com has put together a great team of guest lecturers for his PowerPivotPro School. I am honored to be in this list:

• Denny Lee, co-author of Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint
• Miguel Escobar, translator of DAX Formulas para PowerPivot
• Kasper de Jonge, SQL Server client tools at Microsoft
• Zack Barresse, Excel MVP and author of the upcoming book on Excel tables
• Bill Jelen, Excel MVP and author of PowerPivot for the Data Analyst

By signing up, you get full access to the course for the next 12 months. But you have to sign up by Friday, August 16, 2013.  Head over to PowerPivotPro School to register.

Rob PowerPivotPro Collie to offer PowerPivot School

Registration is now open for Rob Collie’s Advanced PowerPivot course. Rob is my favorite Excel PowerPivot guru – he creates amazing dashboards and reports and has mastered time intelligence and other difficult functions.

If you want to become awesome at PowerPivot, check out his course. Registration is open August 1 – 7, 2013. Click here for more information.

Excel SoCal Social – Meetup in Santa Monica Weds July 31 2013

=”It’s “&TEXT(DATE(2013,7,31),”mmm dd, yyyy “) & ” @ ” & TEXT(TIME(17,0,0),”h:mm AM/PM”) & ” somewhere!”

Calling all southern California Excellers: Let’s meet up Wednesday July 31, 2013 6-8PM at Finn McCool’s Irish Pub in Santa Monica, hosted by @XSzil and @MrExcel.

While I make it to SoCal almost every summer, it’s been 9 years and 354 days since the last meetup down in Irvine.  Clearly, we can’t let 10 years go by, so it is time to get together again. (Wow – I look 10 years younger in these pictures from the last event)

This time, you will get two Excel gurus – as Szilvia Juhasz (@XSzil), Hollywood’s first spreadsheet heroine will be co-hosting the event. We will meet up at Finn McCool’s Irish Pub, 2702 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA 90405. There is a happy hour from 6-7PM and then we will do some live tweeting from 7PM to 8PM at the hashtag #XLSoCal. If you can’t attend, join us via Twitter. It is sure to be a good time – the most fun you will ever have while joining a bunch of tipsy Excel nerds arguing about VLOOKUP!

(Note for those tweeting: 7PM Pacific is 10PM Eastern US, 3AM in London, Noon in Sydney)

If the happy hour is happy enough, you might even go to see us re-enact the day when Szilvia showed up in one of my classes wondering why I didn’t include the awesome Show Pages feature in the first edition of Pivot Table Data Crunching. (Don’t worry, it is in the 2nd through 4th editions and one of my favorite pivot table tricks now).

Winners of Autographed Copies of “Ctrl+Shift+Enter” by Mike “ExcelIsFun” Girvin

Congratulations to You!