Podcast appearances and mentions of bill jelen

Uncover the transformative journey of Bill Jelen, affectionately known as Mr. Excel, as he shares how virtual reality fitness revolutionized his life, and social connections. From initially overlooking his Supernatural subscription to finding a deeply motivating community, Bill reveals the power of virtual workout parties and engaging with fellow enthusiasts. Explore how these experiences have turned fitness into a social and enriching endeavor, and the support of friends keeping his fitness momentum alive.Visit the website at: https://fortheloveofthemap.buzzsprout.comJoin the For the Love of the Map's Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1153000382332695/Google Guest Form: https://forms.gle/9ATRyjTix9L1mzDi6Bill's Mr Excel YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/@mrxl?si=tTvU-PhHzQV2LNYpSupernatural Challenge Group: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/17aQYL9ESs/We would love to hear from you!

Are the Excel Championships just another bit of content for ESPN? Could it keep the Pac 12 alive? More importantly, is it an eSport and can we gamble on it? Listen in!   Featured Guests Andrew Grigolyunovich - Founder and CEO of the Financial Modeling World Cup David Clayton Brown, Ph.D. - Associate Professor of Finance at the Eller College of Business at the University of Arizona "Mr. Excel" Bill Jelen - Excel Expert, Consultant, Author & Play-by-Play Announcer Adrien Bouchet, Ph.D. - Richard & Helen DeVos Foundation Endowed Chair; Eminent Scholar of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at UCF Sean Dennis, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor, Kenneth G. Dixon School of Accounting at UCF   Episode Transcription Announcer from the movie "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story": Live from Las Vegas, It's the Las Vegas International Dodge Ball Open here on ESPN 8: The Ocho, bringing you the finest in seldom scene sports from around the globe since 1999. If it's almost a sport, we've got it here. Paul Jarley: But I have to admit I did not see this coming. This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I'm Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I've got lots of questions. To get answers, I'm talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered, is this really a thing? Onto our show. Paul Jarley: While, it most certainly isn't "Dodgeball," and we aren't breaking down Average Joe's, we are talking about the Excel Championships that just aired on ESPN, and will be heading to Las Vegas in December. Are the Excel Championships even close to an eSport? I really need help understanding why Excel is on ESPN. To form an opinion on this, I've assembled the following panel of experts. Andrew Grigolyunovich is the Founder and CEO of the Financial Modeling World Cup and joins us all the way from Latvia. David Clayton Brown is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Eller College of Business at the University of Arizona. Bill Jelen goes by the moniker Mr. Excel. He has authored several books on Excel and is the competition's play-by-play guy. Adrian Bouchet is the DeVos Endowed Chair of Sports Management and Chair of the Sports Business Management Program here in the College of Business. Finally, Sean Dennis is an Associate Professor in our Dixon School of Accounting. Listen in. Paul Jarley: So one of the very first podcasts I did was on eSports and the premise of it was whether eSports was going to be a thing or not. I came down on the side that I thought it was going to be a big thing that I thought it wouldn't just be a big thing in the professional ranks, that it would be a big thing in the college ranks as well. And one of the reasons I thought that that would be true is it would be a way for universities to promote a group of geeky students with a unique offering, but I have to admit, I did not see this coming. When I saw the ESPN promotion on The Ocho for this event, I thought, wow, this is one I just wouldn't have imagined. I'm going to start with David and Andrew here. Where did the idea for these kinds of competitions come from? Andrew? Andrew Grigolyunovich: It all started, I think that was back in 2012, the first competition of a similar kind that was called ModelOff that was created by two guys in Australia and they were doing that on an annual basis and that was devoted to financial modeling. That was called the Financial Modeling World Championship. They had a name brand named ModelOff. I was one of the players, David was one of the players there. We were good players, we made it to the finals a couple of times and in 2016 we were among the top 16 players in London. So the difference between what you saw on ESPN, first of all, that was annual, not regular. Second, it was more player oriented, less show oriented. That was basically targeting finance professionals, giving them very interesting cases to solve,

In this episode of Kasper On BI we are talking about Excel. How is it used at every company in the world? Who is it for? How is it different...

Bill Jelen joined us for a chat during the 2022 Financial Modelling Summit. Hear his thoughts on the future of automation, Microsoft Excel and which talk impressed him most. The Financial Modelling Summit is the world's largest gathering of financial modellers. From experts, deal makers and executives to those just starting their financial modelling journey.

This year the Financial Modelling Summit is taking the journey from Numbers to Insights. Bill Jelen joins the Financial Modelling Podcast, summit host, to share what he is most looking forward to at this year's event. The Financial Modelling Summit is the world's largest gathering of financial modellers. Buy your tickets here: https://www.financialmodellingsummit.com/.  

Il faut le voir pour le croire. Excel, le célèbre tableur de Microsoft a désormais droit à sa propre compétition de e-sport. Mi-août, la chaîne américaine dédiée au sport ESPN a diffusé la Coupe du Monde de Modélisation Financière. Un concours pas comme les autres et qui ne cesse de faire réagir internet.La Financial Modeling World Cup ou Coupe du Monde de Modélisation Financière sur Excel a eu lieu en mai dernier, mais n'a été diffusée que mi-août par ESPN l'émission The Ocho, consacrée aux sports de niche comme le dodgeball (balle au prisonnier en français) ou encore le air guitar. Objectif de cette compétition d'Excel : résoudre trois problèmes en trois manches de 30 minutes, un peu à la manière d'un escape game. Et clairement, il ne s'agissait pas d'une édition banale. Non, là on parle bien de la crème de la crème des experts d'Excel dans une compétition All-Star. Les participants ont notamment dû concevoir avec leur tableur une machine à sous, un jeu de plateforme en 6 niveaux et une course de yacht. Si vous souhaitez tenter l'une de ces trois missions, voir les trois, le fichier Excel avec les consignes est disponible sur le site internet de la compétition.Et une compétition d'Excel à quoi ça ressemble dans le format ? Comme je vous l'ai dit, tout se déroule en trois épreuves. Après chaque round, la moitié des compétiteurs et compétitrices est éliminée. Les commentaires eux, sont signés Bill Jelen, auteur de plus de 40 livres sur Excel et Oz Du Soleil de la chaîne Youtube Excel on Fire. Et le moins que l'on puisse dire, c'est qu'on a vraiment l'impression d'assister à une compétition d'e-sport tant Jelen et Oz nous raconte les méthodes des compétiteurs, et abordent des sujets propres à Excel tout en commentant chaque décision des candidats.Pour tout dire, les championnats d'Excel sont de plus en plus populaires. Ces derniers sont notamment retransmis sur YouTube, et les derniers matchs comptent déjà plus de 500 000 vues chacun. Face au succès de cette édition All-Star, un nouveau championnat est déjà prévu pour octobre avec un prix de 10 000 dollars promis au vainqueur. D'autres compétitions dont des tournois européens et une autre coupe du monde devraient avoir lieu prochainement. Les inscriptions pour le FMWC Open sont déjà ouvertes, je vous mets le lien dans la description si cela vous tente. Les 128 meilleurs compétiteurs seront sélectionnés en Octobre avec une finale prévue le 12 Novembre.Télécharger les trois missions : https://www.fmworldcup.com/product/all-star-bundle/Inscriptions au FMWC Open : https://www.fmworldcup.com/excel-esports/fmwc-open-2022/ Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Il faut le voir pour le croire. Excel, le célèbre tableur de Microsoft a désormais droit à sa propre compétition de e-sport. Mi-août, la chaîne américaine dédiée au sport ESPN a diffusé la Coupe du Monde de Modélisation Financière. Un concours pas comme les autres et qui ne cesse de faire réagir internet. La Financial Modeling World Cup ou Coupe du Monde de Modélisation Financière sur Excel a eu lieu en mai dernier, mais n'a été diffusée que mi-août par ESPN l'émission The Ocho, consacrée aux sports de niche comme le dodgeball (balle au prisonnier en français) ou encore le air guitar. Objectif de cette compétition d'Excel : résoudre trois problèmes en trois manches de 30 minutes, un peu à la manière d'un escape game. Et clairement, il ne s'agissait pas d'une édition banale. Non, là on parle bien de la crème de la crème des experts d'Excel dans une compétition All-Star. Les participants ont notamment dû concevoir avec leur tableur une machine à sous, un jeu de plateforme en 6 niveaux et une course de yacht. Si vous souhaitez tenter l'une de ces trois missions, voir les trois, le fichier Excel avec les consignes est disponible sur le site internet de la compétition. Et une compétition d'Excel à quoi ça ressemble dans le format ? Comme je vous l'ai dit, tout se déroule en trois épreuves. Après chaque round, la moitié des compétiteurs et compétitrices est éliminée. Les commentaires eux, sont signés Bill Jelen, auteur de plus de 40 livres sur Excel et Oz Du Soleil de la chaîne Youtube Excel on Fire. Et le moins que l'on puisse dire, c'est qu'on a vraiment l'impression d'assister à une compétition d'e-sport tant Jelen et Oz nous raconte les méthodes des compétiteurs, et abordent des sujets propres à Excel tout en commentant chaque décision des candidats. Pour tout dire, les championnats d'Excel sont de plus en plus populaires. Ces derniers sont notamment retransmis sur YouTube, et les derniers matchs comptent déjà plus de 500 000 vues chacun. Face au succès de cette édition All-Star, un nouveau championnat est déjà prévu pour octobre avec un prix de 10 000 dollars promis au vainqueur. D'autres compétitions dont des tournois européens et une autre coupe du monde devraient avoir lieu prochainement. Les inscriptions pour le FMWC Open sont déjà ouvertes, je vous mets le lien dans la description si cela vous tente. Les 128 meilleurs compétiteurs seront sélectionnés en Octobre avec une finale prévue le 12 Novembre. Télécharger les trois missions : https://www.fmworldcup.com/product/all-star-bundle/ Inscriptions au FMWC Open : https://www.fmworldcup.com/excel-esports/fmwc-open-2022/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every video you upload has to have a purpose and an intent. You can't just upload random videos and hope for the best. It's crucial to decide from the start the objective of your channel if you want your YouTube journey to succeed. The niche you'll be targeting is the foundation of a YouTube business. Many people already know their niche when they decide to start a YouTube channel because they want to focus on something they usually do. Bill Jelen also known as Mr. Excel has been practicing his niche since 1998 by writing books about Excel and sharing his knowledge on YouTube in 2008. No doubt he's an MVP (Most valuable professional) of Microsoft! But how was he able to come up in this niche? In today's podcast, Grant and Bill share how it all started on Bill's journey with Excel and how he was able to monetize this niche on YouTube.Bill Jelen's YouTube channel, Mr. Excel, has reached 121,000 subscribers and over 16 million channel views. Bill is also a writer and an ultimate expert in Excel. Check out the Episode Highlights01:48   How Bill come up with his books about Excel06:00   Bill's strategy when he started Mr. Excel channel10:38   How Mr. Excel affected Bill's website mrexcel.com12:25   How Bill develop a system for his content17:15   Bill's transition from selling books to creating a YouTube channel23:07   How Bill crafted Mr. Excel as his identity on YouTube25:17   How Mr. Excel's website boosted Bill's community engagement 30:27   YouTube as a platform to answer people's questions33:27   How Mr. Excel affected Bill's life37:17   Bill's advice on starting your own online businessLinks/ Resources MentionedCheck out the Mr. Excel websiteMr. Excel's YouTube channelSubscribe to the Video Creatr Youtube channelCheck out these awesome channels and gain more inspiration.Check out Grant and Augie's Channels below:Grant BallTreesicleAugie JohnstonVidchopsBaller Boot Camp 

Wordle Excel and More: An Interesting Chat about all Things Wordle was supposed to simple focus on Excel. But I had so many questions about Wordle, it quickly became Excel and More. We discussed All Things Wordle. If you are an Excel geek, #Wordle and #Excel are a natural fit. #Wordlestrategy If you wonder if you can solve wordle in Excel, the answer is yes. This episode will explain exactly how to use excel to come up with the right wordle solution. In this wordle interview with MRExcel, he explains how using both Excel and wordle tips and tricks. The wordle interview with Bill Jelen was a lot of fun because in addition to discussing how to use excel to solve a wordle puzzle, we discussed a number of different issues related to Wordle including Best wordle words, whether plurals are a possible answer and more. If you are obsessed with how to win at wordle, this session might help. Whether lookin for wordle answers or wordle expert tips for the wordle game, this wordle game strategy, will help so you don't have to make a wordle guess. Even if you don't want to solve wordle with excel, I think you'll find the conversation intriguing and full of wordle tips. This Wordle assistant will help those who are looking for a different approach when it comes to how to solve wordle using excel. Bill's MRExcel YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/c/MrExcelcom Link to Wordle Expert Strategy Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtL6rWSXZ-Hc5DXw7YrnGSthw0Q3y1gf8 Link to 8 Misconceptions about AP https://youtu.be/1Cp_vfrkSSw Host: Mary Schaeffer www.ap-now.com Guest: Bill Jelen https://www.mrexcel.com/

Leaving Earth behind. Photo by Bill Jelen on Unsplash.

We welcome Power Platform expertise in the form of Two Alex! Alex Dupler and Alex Powers both work at Microsoft. The organization they work for and their first names aren't the only thing that these two share! They also both have a lot of experience with and passion for the Power Platform. Alex Powers is a member of the Power BI Customer Advisory Team (PBICAT), and Alex Dupler is a Program Manager focused on BI & Data Infrastructure. These guys know data! Follow Two Alex: Alex Dupler Twitter Alex Powers Twitter Two Alex Youtube Channel References in this Episode: Raw Data with Brad and Kai from Agree Media Episode Timeline: 7:00 - The woes of Stack Ranking, Data storage options, more fun with names! 22:00 - What draws you to data?, The value (and drawbacks) of Excel, and the path to Power BI 36:40 - Two Alex-similarities and differences, Rob tells a story of someone crossing him, and one of Rob's favorites-the art of using BI to drive action 59:00 - When BI and IT collide, the 2 Alex's non-traditional BI path, the value of being an expert even if you aren't THE expert 1:16:00 - Two Alex LOVE helping people, is there value to documentation?, knowing the Business portion of Business Intelligence 1:37:00 - Advertising performance discussion Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Today's guests are Alex Powers and Alex Dupler, collectively known as Two Alex. They're both Microsoft employees in very different roles, but both have their feet rooted firmly in the power platform. You might be familiar with their YouTube show. I interact with them primarily on Twitter and a little bit on Reddit. And this is the first time I've had really any conversation of length with Alex Powers. And it's the first time I've had any conversation at all with Alex Dupler. And no surprise here, really, really cool people. We had a lot of fun, really dynamic and inspiring, interesting conversation that wound through a number of topics, including some show favorites, like non-traditional backgrounds, and closing the action loop, and imposter syndrome. We talk about how years ago Alex Powers wrote a review of my book that called out the intermission in the book and how, what a delight that was at the time to read. Rob Collie (00:00:57): And that leads to a conversation about how we're always essentially at our own little intermission in our expertise curve. You're always in the middle somewhere. And if we started doing metrics on this podcast, you'd probably find that this one ranked very highly in opinions expressed per minute. Ooh. What could he mean? Let's get into it. Announcer (00:01:21): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? Announcer (00:01:25): This is the Raw Data By P3 Adaptive podcast. With your host, Rob Collie, and your cohost Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:01:49): Welcome to the show. Alex Powers and Alex Dupler. How are you today, gentlemen? Alex Dupler (00:01:54): I'm doing great. It's great to chat with you. Alex Powers (00:01:56): Rob, back-to-back meetings. I'm glad that Luke found us some time here. I was so hesitant about this podcast, just cause I love listening to it. I was like, "I don't know, should I do it? Should I do it? Should I do it?" Rob Collie (00:02:08): The answer is yes, you should do it. Alex Powers (00:02:10): I appreciate Alex D and Rob just pulling us all together. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:02:13): We've already backstage a little bit been laughing about this. So let's bring it out to the front stage. The two of you combined, what do we refer to you as? Are you the Two Alex's? Or something different? Alex Dupler (00:02:23): So we learned separately from our wives that the correct pluralization is two Alex. Rob Collie (00:02:30): See, I just don't buy this. I still think Alex's. I mean, we could get really funky and say, Alexi. Tom LaRock (00:02:36): I was going to say, that's what I think. Yeah, Alexa, Rob Collie (00:02:39): But I mean, think of it this way. There's fish, and that's plural. But even there, there's still fishes, which refers to different species of fish. Yes. I think. Is that what it is? Alex Powers (00:02:51): Yeah, that's right. Fishy. Yes. Rob Collie (00:02:53): I don't know. So the two Alex, are you guys seriously going to go by that now? Is that going to be the new thing, or? Alex Dupler (00:02:58): Well, the YouTube channel is called Two Alex. Rob Collie (00:03:01): How'd the two of you come to know one another? Is it just like, oh, we're both working in data and we're both named Alex. So you're like, you see each other from across the room and your eyes meet across the internet? Alex Powers (00:03:10): I would say across the internet, for sure there. Just because he's up in Redmond, I'm kind of located in St. Louis, Missouri. From there it was kind of this, I think natural, just both being active in the community. Alex D you can keep me honest there, I'm sure we were connecting on Twitter a little bit there before, definitely in the subreddits. One of my earliest memories of was, Hey, this thing isn't folding. And I was like, oh my gosh, it's Power Query. I've got to tackle this. I've got to answer this question. Reddit is where I hang out at. I would say from there that's when we really started coming chat more and more, but Alex D I'll let you kind of tell your side of the story. Alex Dupler (00:03:43): Yeah. Yeah. My recollection is that the first time we interacted with each other, where it wasn't just some random poster on Reddit, was side conversations on Microsoft teams within Microsoft. There's some internal discussions where salespeople can get their question answered and sometimes the questions are interesting. And so, yeah we had some side conversations. Plus back then, when Alex wasn't on the product team, he didn't always have full visibility into the roadmap. And so we would chat on the side about what we would do with the roadmap. Not that we would do a better job, just a different job. Rob Collie (00:04:19): Yeah, I get you. Yeah, I understand. I understand. What are the two of your roles at Microsoft today? Alex Dupler (00:04:25): I work for Microsoft advertising. We're the organization that sells the ads that go on Bing, as well as some partner websites like Yahoo search and AOL search and stuff like that. And I work in the business function of the sales org. So I do BI for a sales team. And it just happens to be at Microsoft, and that influences the technologies that we use. IPM are like data warehouse and big cube stuff. Rob Collie (00:04:50): Cool. We're going to have to circle back to that for sure. And Alex P what are you up to these days? Alex Powers (00:04:56): Yep. So senior program manager on the Power BI customer advisory team, so PBI CAT for maybe those out in the community. I'm called as kind of that last bastion of hope sometimes, where I'm not very close to the solution, not close to the architecture, just come in and fix it. Where Alex D, he owns the solution, he owns the finished product. That's a line of visibility that I completely lose in my day to day. But you get variety, you get to do different things. Some days it's maybe a DAX challenge, next day I'm writing C#. The next day, I'm writing kind of new report, kind of clicky, clicky, draggy droppy experiences. So a vast rich tapestry of Power BI. Rob Collie (00:05:32): So you're on the CAT team with a number of people that have already been on the show, right? Adam Saxton, Casper, Chris Webb. You're part of that crew? Alex Powers (00:05:41): Yep. Rob Collie (00:05:41): I hear that that crew continues to expand, it's like this great gravitational attractor. It's like just hoovering all of these people. Let's just have it on the record. Does the Power BI CAT team have ambitions of world takeover? Alex Powers (00:05:53): Every day. And I think what you're seeing right now is a lot of formality. Community contributors, experts, decades of experience. They're now turning into bosses, they're now turning into managers. So they're getting further away from the technology and kind of now being people managers. I'm enjoying our livestream here because Rob is laughing. He's like, oh, I know that exact feeling. Rob Collie (00:06:14): I do. I do, right. I got a request today from some media outlet to interview me for Power BI tips. And I'm like, gosh folks, I'm probably not that person. You want to talk about strategy, okay, that's different. But I have gotten further and further. I still build some Power BI stuff for sure, for my own purposes. But I don't have that day to day, like, this is my life. That's not how my day goes anymore. I'm back to the management game after years of being out of it. Yeah. Growing a company tends to keep you out of the actual hands-dirty data trenches that started the whole thing. Alex Dupler (00:06:52): Well, if you ever start stack ranking, that's when it's going to be time to sell it. Rob Collie (00:06:56): True story, stack ranking was the reason why I actually stopped being a manager at Microsoft. At one point, I just said, I'm done applying the system for you. I was sick of it. And I understand it's gone now. I found out the hard way that stepping back from a management position didn't just relieve me of that stack ranking thing that I found immoral and uncool. It also took me out of a lot of the important conversations. I just didn't have nearly the input or influence that I had before. And that was hard. If I was still at Microsoft today, my career at Microsoft would still have suffered like a multi-year setback because of this era where I just said, I'm done. I know that at this point, the whole stack rank thing has been gone for a long time, but it was still a number of years later after I left that it still persisted. No, we're never going to do that. We're never going to play lifeboat with human beings. I mean, it really sucked, right? Basically, if you built a really good team, either by recruiting or by development or both, you were punished for it. Alex Dupler (00:08:04): Yeah. Apply this to Alex's team. You want to stack rank Chris Webb and Casper and Adam? Tom LaRock (00:08:09): I will. I'll do it. Rob Collie (00:08:11): Which one of them gets told that they had a terrible year? Right? Tom LaRock (00:08:16): I'd be happy to do it. Rob Collie (00:08:20): Hey, listen. As long as we put that kind of phenomenal power in the hands of a benevolent tyrant, like Tom, it's perfectly safe. What could go wrong? Alex Dupler (00:08:29): That is what they said about solar winds. Tom LaRock (00:08:34): My first criteria, having known them for many years, is Jaeger consumption. So we'll just start with that and work our way down the stack. Rob Collie (00:08:44): Which way are we going to sort that list though? We sort it largest to smallest, or smallest to largest? I mean, I could see that list being sorted either way. Tom LaRock (00:08:50): We'll try it both ways and see how it shakes out. Rob Collie (00:08:53): Yeah. I mean, it could be like a honeypot, right? Put some Jaeger out there, see who goes for it? You're getting the 3.0. We won't be doing any of that, thankfully. Now, Alex P, you were previously in a different role, right? Alex Powers (00:09:10): Yes. So, here at Microsoft less than two years, came in through the premier field engineer side to support, really had a blast there kind of proactive engagements training, probably train like 4,000 Tableau users on the Power BI. So just like the grind of doing it day in, day out, talking about the product, I just absolutely loved that. Transitioned to kind of field sales roles. There it's competitor competes, a lot of disinformation where they're saying, well, Power BI can never do this. What do you mean it can't do that? Here's an article. Here's me, kind of the whizzbang demo. That's probably where I got my hyperlink chops for those that kind of know me on the community. Alex Powers (00:09:44): This is the good and bad of the pandemic is like, Hey, we're making some career advancements, we're working long hours, whatever else it may be. A lot of my goal whiteboard over here was, Hey, I want to be on the Power BI CAT team. Had that visibility, just kind of did those grinding over the fall and winter months when we're all stuck inside. But I'm sorry, Thomas. I don't know how good I would be at the Jaeger thing, just because I don't have that peer connection. I haven't met my coworkers. So that's tough for a lot of people that I think are just making career jumps during the pandemic right now. Rob Collie (00:10:16): Yeah. I mean, it's weird. I live in a completely altered reality where we've been a hundred percent remote, I've been a hundred percent remote for 11 years. Probably more closer to 12, actually. Our company was a hundred percent remote from the beginning, basically out of necessity. To me, it's shocking how many people who've been at this company for a long time have never met each other face to face. We did a gathering, a team gathering in 2019. We didn't do one in 2020. I don't remember why we didn't do that. We haven't done one this year, either. We're hoping to maybe do one in 2022. We've hired so many people in the last year that there's like half the company that I haven't ever been in person with. Alex Powers (00:11:02): It's tough. Rob Collie (00:11:03): It's different, isn't it? Alex Powers (00:11:04): Yeah. I think it was like the good meme the other day where it's like, Hey, here's your company culture, it's just like an empty cubicle. And it's like, well, people don't even have that anymore. It's just, here's your new job, here's your new email. Log in, welcome to the company. Great friend of mine, Mark Beedle, I know kind of joined T3 adaptive. I love that he's like, this is where I want to be. I think of the P3 of the past, where you take the group, I think, up to Seattle or some of the different areas. And then it was like, oh wow, they're all getting together and having fun. You know, I tried applying for the job, but unfortunately your Excel file was corrupt and I couldn't pass the test. Rob Collie (00:11:36): Oh, I see. I see how this [crosstalk 00:11:38]. Alex Powers (00:11:38): Yeah, what happened with that, Rob? Rob Collie (00:11:39): I don't know, man. Alex Powers (00:11:40): That's really what I wanted to corner you on today. Rob Collie (00:11:43): That might've been part of the test, Alex. Alex Powers (00:11:45): I literally thought it was, that responded that way. I was like, I don't know if they're testing me with a corrupted file. Alex Dupler (00:11:50): Yeah. You need to have mastered the Open XML format of the Excel file, and be able to track down the corruption in the Power Query. Rob Collie (00:12:00): I saw a joke or a meme on some social media a couple of years ago about cast iron, the hipsters with their cast iron and how you have to take care of it and everything like that. And then after you're done with that, you have to dry it in the sun for 24 hours. And someone goes, 24 hours? And they go, yeah, if you're not willing to go to the Arctic, you don't deserve cast iron. So it's like that kind of test. Yeah. Alex Dupler (00:12:23): We beat the crap out of our cast iron, it's just fine. Rob Collie (00:12:26): Okay. And now Alex Dupler. You're working in BI in the advertising wing, within Bing but also the affiliated networks like Yahoo and things like that. And so you mentioned that you're in charge of the data warehouse and you're in charge of, you said big cube. Alex Dupler (00:12:42): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:12:43): For a year I worked on Bing, and maybe this is a completely different dataset than what you actually end up caring about, but the state of the world back then was there was this giant distributed commodity hardware database system, data storage system called Cosmos. Alex Dupler (00:12:58): Yep. Rob Collie (00:12:58): One of the world's foremost write-only data stores. It was amazing at storing data. You could never get anything useful out of it. There was only one person in the entire organization, named Jamie Buckley, who was capable of actually running queries against this thing. And so if you wanted any information whatsoever about what searches were being run and things like that, yeah sure, you could try to write a query against this thing. And what would happen is you'd get syntax error after syntax error after syntax error, and then eventually you kick off a query and it wouldn't give you any errors. And you're like sweet. And it would run and run and run and you go away and you'd come back like a day and a half later and then you'd get a runtime error. Alex Dupler (00:13:38): Yeah. And when it works, you get a CSV. And so we still have that. I think when I was getting trained on it, which they said it had something like 5% of the world's data in it. Cause it's not just Bing, it's X-Box and a whole bunch of stuff. It's this really cool exabyte scale thing. But nobody knows how to use it, partially because it uses scope scripts, which the only commercial product they've ever been used in is the ATLS gen one analytics feature, which was not a successful product and is being deprecated. And so you can't hire people that know how to use it, there's just like a bunch of vendors that have learned it. And I can't write it either. Also, I don't know if this was your experience, but the engineers are allergic to writing documentation. It's got these petabyte sized tables with 400 columns and there'll be a data dictionary and it doesn't have any descriptions of any of the columns. Rob Collie (00:14:33): This does match my experience, yes. Alex Dupler (00:14:35): So we use that some, we also have other partners. I mean, it's a huge organization. We just missed getting touted in the quarterly earnings as having crossed $10 billion for the last fiscal year. I think the public number is like 9.95 or 9.5 billion. Yeah so it's a real business, even though the market share is pretty small. It turns out advertising is just a really, really good business. So we take a bunch of data out of there, and then also from partners that take data in there, and put it all in Databricks and make it available to folks that way. And we love Databricks because our analysts, they can come with whatever skills they have, and they can be successful on day one. Because they don't have to learn SCOPE or KQL or whatever. Alex Dupler (00:15:22): They can write Python, they can write R, they can write SQL, there's a cube so they can do Power BI, they can do Excel. They can do whatever they want, all in the same data. Now, if they want to do things that are super fancy, they may have a hard time using the cube. So they got to write something. Rob Collie (00:15:41): Yeah. Alex Dupler (00:15:42): But if you're a PM owning a project, you can drag and drop in that cube all day long and have a good time. And then the other thing that we like about the setup we have is, with the data in Data Lake, our partners that have their own generous Azure budgets, they're not running queries against our server. Whereas if we put it in Synapse or SQL, when they want to query our data, we're paying for this compute. But here they just mount it onto their own compute system, and they pay for it. And that's great. We like when other people pay to use our data. Rob Collie (00:16:15): So it's funny, I actually expected that the answer to the question was going to be, oh no, no, we fixed all that. That original system is completely straightened out, it's got a much more human friendly interface. But it turns out that you just have other systems that are human friendly. And those things have to... on the order of one-time investments to figure out how to populate those things from the great Oracle that is Cosmos. Alex Dupler (00:16:41): Yeah that's largely true. I mean, in Cosmos, they've implemented the ATLS APIs. So you can mount data in Cosmos directly to a Spark engine and do stuff that way, if you want. Yeah. Basically that's how they've done things. You will not be surprised to learn that Microsoft likes to reuse names. Maybe you've seen this phenomenon before in the word power, but yeah. Cosmos, the internal exabyte scale data platform is not the same as Cosmos DB, the Azure product, which is for, I couldn't even describe it. It's for, like, everything. Rob Collie (00:17:19): Yeah. I mean, there's only so many cool nouns. And furthermore, the set of cool nouns in the world is further refined by the ones that computer scientists gravitate to. So you end up with a really small population of words. And the chances... It's like the pigeonhole principle from math, right? You need 450 names, you only have 300 words. So you're screwed. And so you end up with things like the word dashboard being repurposed to mean something kind of niche in Power BI. That's one that I wish we could get a do-over on. And you know, I'm a sinner. I named some things poorly in my day. I'll give you an example. When PowerPivot V1, and actually several versions of PowerPivot, at least in 2010, there were those two drop zones, extra drop zones in the pivot table field list, for slicers. Rob Collie (00:18:11): Cause Amir insisted that we make slicer layout really easy as opposed to tedious. So we had these extra drop zones, and one drop zone put the slicers down the left-hand side of the pivot table and one put them across the top of the pivot table. What did I name those two zones? Horizontal and vertical slicers. For years after that, when I taught that product to classes, they go, oh, what does a horizontal slicer do that's different than a vertical slicer? And I just sit there with my head in my hands like, it should have been left and top, Rob. Why did you... Previous Rob, why were you so nerdy and stupid at the same time? Left and top. Alex Dupler (00:18:48): Well you see, in an indimensional cube, there are some things that are horizontal and some things that are vertical. Once you understand what the tubal is, it'll all make sense. Rob Collie (00:18:59): Yes. So let's go back to basics and... Yeah, no. It's just left and top. Yep. These are what you call own goals. Can't make these things up. It's even funnier, by that point in my career when I made that mistake, I was already kind of like this rabid high priest of naming. Like, we should be better. And here I was in the course of delivering those sermons, just committing tremendous sins out the back of the church. It's just like. Alex Dupler (00:19:31): Yeah, it turns out we should be better in, oh crap, I got an hour before this presentation, what am I going to call this thing? Those are two overlapping states of being. Rob Collie (00:19:41): You know, people's hearts are in the right place. So I still think that the two of you probably might've gravitated toward each other just a little bit, maybe like 1% more, because of the shared first name. Can I be allowed like an extra 1% gravity on this? Alex Powers (00:19:54): 99. I mean, a lot of Alex's within Microsoft that are doing Power BI, we've all kind of banded together. Rob Collie (00:19:59): There's like an Alex crew? Alex Powers (00:20:01): Hell yeah. Big time. There's multiple Two Alex's, too. Rob Collie (00:20:04): As we've established, once you get above like three or four Alex, it's suddenly Alex's. That's when it becomes plural. Alex Dupler (00:20:10): There are at least two Alex's working at Microsoft in the Power BI ecosystem that are smarter than either of us. Rob Collie (00:20:17): Well I mean, going back to something we were talking about earlier, every single person, every single consultant at P3 is a hell of a lot better at Power BI than I ever was. I can't even argue that it's like, oh, I'm off my peak. It's not that at all. They were always going to be much, much better. It's very humbling. Like in the real sense of the word, when you sort of get put in your place. Alex Powers (00:20:40): Is this like a time thing, Rob? Cause I feel it too. It's like the early days, Power Pivot and Power Query were something like, I'm digging, I'm learning all of these things. And then like everything else is kind of passing me by and it's like, yeah I'll catch up to that at some point. And I see the wild stuff that people are doing nowadays, like, I don't know what nights and weekends they're spending learning this product, but I'm working twice as hard and I'm still not catching up. Alex Dupler (00:21:00): Yeah. I was watching the other demo the other day. And he was talking about how you should have your report and your data model in two separate PBIX's. This was Mike Carlo. It was a great demo. But then he was like, and to make this really easy, what we're going to do is we're going to edit the PBIX. And I was like, hold on a second. You can't do that. That's not allowed. Rob Collie (00:21:22): [crosstalk 00:21:22] Like actually hacking the file? Like he got into the file structure? Alex Dupler (00:21:25): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:21:26): I do love me some file hacking. For me, I think it's not necessarily a question of time. It's actually that the universe has returned to its default state with respect to me. Which is, the whole time I worked at Microsoft, in all the years I was on the engineering teams, I worked with plenty of people who were super technical, but also enthusiastically technical. When VB.Net came out, and ASP.NET, I had some colleagues that just dove into that. They loved it, it was the most amazing thing. And I just could never... I was still at that point going like, okay, well I learned how to write my VBA, and I'm sticking with it. That's where the frontier of my coding, actual procedural coding, is still VBA six. Rob Collie (00:22:09): For some reason, DAX and data modeling, as technical tools go, DAX and data modeling really, really spoke to me. Like I freaking loved it and still do, still do to this day. And Excel formulas are kind of the same thing, right? This is the handful of exceptional technologies that really seem to appeal to my nervous system, and none of the others do. And by the way, M is another example that does not appeal to me at all. Alex Powers (00:22:38): I am the opposite. I love M. Rob Collie (00:22:39): Really? You love M? Alex Powers (00:22:40): I love, love, love. Hell yeah. Rob Collie (00:22:42): You're not my species then, you're something completely different. Alex Dupler (00:22:47): So I think one of the big things that drew me to data modeling, so there's a lot of constraints. And with programming, it's like, there's such an open world. Like the only programming I could ever really get my head around was VBA. That's where I started. You didn't have to have a big, complicated object model. There was just Excel. That was your object model. And it made everything so much easier. And you're like, okay, well, what I'm trying to do is move these cells to those cells. And with data modeling, especially in Power BI, it's like, well, I need one column for these relationships. And I need these relationships to flow in one direction. The constraints make it a much more manageable problem, but also opens up room for more creativity. Rob Collie (00:23:30): I agree. And also VBA comes with a macro recorder, the world's greatest set of training wheels. It's like, if I want to build an app from scratch, I can't like act out like pantomime what the app will do, and have something spit out code for it. Alex Dupler (00:23:48): Draw some stick fingers in Figma and just drag them around, and get some code from that. Rob Collie (00:23:51): Yeah. It's like, mock up the UI in Balsamiq or something, or Vizio, and then start mashing on the screen with your finger and say, okay. And then speaking out loud, what should happen at that... there's no macro recording for actual software developers. Alex Dupler (00:24:04): I think we got to tell Charles that, that's what he's got to do with his AI driven power apps development. Rob Collie (00:24:09): Yeah. It's we need to turn this into a LARPing thing, right? You just act out the application in the real world with these cameras... Holo lens. There it is. We've solved the world's problems. Take that for low code development. Alex Powers (00:24:26): Well, I like how Power Automate's now watching your points and clicks, and generating flows for you. Rob Collie (00:24:32): See, I didn't know that it did that. Alex Powers (00:24:33): Oh yeah. You're training the machine. You don't even have to write the code anymore. It's like, oh, automation is here. It's really here now. Rob Collie (00:24:41): It's always a feel good moment to meet a fellow VBA 6-er. The world used to be lousy with us. We were just everywhere. It's kind of a dying art. Office has got this new JavaScript API, Office Scripts. That's incredible. Again, in theory. I haven't touched it, because it's not reaching out and grabbing me by the eyeballs. I'm tempted though. It's sort of like, oh, a new VBA six and they have a macro recorder and I'm like, okay, maybe, maybe. This might be the way I learn JavaScript someday, is Office Scripts. Alex Dupler (00:25:09): Yeah, that sounds like how I'd learn it, except Excel is dead to me. I mean, I use Excel for note taking and PM stuff, but data work, I don't use it. Because first of all, Power Query is the way to go. And in Excel, when you have Power Query over, you can't save the Excel file. Rob Collie (00:25:28): Really? Alex Dupler (00:25:29): Yeah, Power Query takes a lock, like a lot of the old school windows. And you can't get back to the main- Rob Collie (00:25:34): Modal window. Alex Dupler (00:25:35): Yeah. So you can't save, you can't refer back to the data. You can't open stuff. And it's not like Excel ever crashes when you're working with lots of data. So saving, it's not that important. And if you want to say, first you have to evaluate your queries or set them to disable load. But if you've already loaded some, if you do something to disable load, it destroys the cells. I just said, I'll do it all in Power BI. No more Excel. Not because there's anything wrong with Excel. It's just that that user experience was just so unacceptable to me. I lost so many hours of work. Tom LaRock (00:26:10): Wait, what do you mean, not that there's something wrong... Clearly there's something wrong with Excel. Alex Dupler (00:26:14): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:26:15): Alex, you're cut from a cloth that I understand very well. Your sarcastic cynicism is, ooh, it speaks to me. Yeah, we've come to the right place. Even I, team Excel guy, I am really on team Excel. I haven't written any DAX in the Excel environment in several years. It's all Power BI, all the time now. Alex Dupler (00:26:38): The other big thing is why would you want to write DAX in an environment that you can't schedule to refresh? Unless you don't have pro licenses, like... Alex Powers (00:26:47): Hold on, let me challenge you now. Here we go, this is a little taste of Two Alex. So I love Ken Puls, where he's saying, Hey, I don't want the heavy weight of Power BI. If I can do as much as possible within Excel, be it Power Query or even Power Pivot. I would agree that. Alex Powers (00:27:03): Be it kind of power query or even power pivot. I would agree that the development experience is severely lacking. That's not to say that the power BI side is the best in the world, obviously Dax studio, et cetera. But I would much rather take a lightweight application over a heavy one every day and then just import that data model into power BI when I'm ready. Rob Collie (00:27:19): To me, the primary value of these technologies in Excel is as an on-ramp to the power BI universe for the authors. Tomorrow's power BI authors are today living in Excel. And the reason, I've said this multiple times on this podcast of multiple different people at Microsoft, but the reason why I'm, I don't want to use like the passive aggressive version of the word disappointed. Let's use the completely neutral version of the word disappointed. The reason why I'm disappointed that there isn't more investment there is because that is the gateway drug, and as a universe, as a community, like we really need to care about bringing those new people on. And that's where they're going to come to. To tell those same people, "No, put Excel down and start learning this in a completely new environment," their immune systems reject that because they've been sold a million times on the idea that something's going to replace Excel. They know better by now. Rob Collie (00:28:23): But no one in that category, like the V lookup and pivot route, none of them resist the idea of there being crazy, powerful new versions and features of the things that they're already doing. You get them 48 hours into that new world, and they're more than happy to switch to the power BI environment. They're excited about it. Those same people who would have rejected it 48 hours before. You got to take them on that path and this thing not getting the love that I think it deserves, I understand it's from the perspective of our real production environment is the power BI environment. I get that. But the on-ramp, they are doing some things about that, even things that I didn't know, because they're targeted at people who don't know about this stuff and I already do. Brian, when he was on the podcast, was talking about how they're using machine learning, advanced clippy generation seven, to detect the people who should be interested in this stuff and sort of pointing them to power BI. And there actually was really good uptake of that. That feature didn't fire for me because I don't use V Lookup or regular pivot tables anymore. Alex Dupler (00:29:23): That's almost exactly the journey that I went on. Like many of your guests, I did not go to school for power BI. I actually, I went to school for chemistry and I worked as a chemist for a couple of years. I was doing lab work and I was very bad at lab work. I mean, I understood the chemistry, but I would break glassware that was expensive and stuff like that. Which when you make $15 an hour, breaking expensive glassware is a good way to get in trouble. So I was like "Okay, well I grew up in a very computer centric family. Maybe I can do some of this Excel stuff." And so I was doing visual basic, and we were doing some dashboards, like operational reporting. And I had Excel in this company. I loved the people there, but it was not a successful business. We had maybe a hundred thousand dollars in revenue per employee with high CapEx, because we had these big, expensive instruments that we had to buy and chemicals and all sorts of stuff, lots of HVAC. So there was not enough money to pay people to live in Seattle, so every office license was a battle. Alex Powers (00:30:31): Wow. Alex Dupler (00:30:31): I was looking at, okay, what can I do with Excel 2007, because we had some of that I think we had enough licenses, but it didn't really check. So we didn't really pay too much attention. But then I was like wanting to use power query because I had sort of discovered it was easier, but I couldn't. So I was like, "Okay, how do I get this macro to run as a service so that I can refresh these dashboards on these dowels that we bought second hand?" Rob Collie (00:31:01): You know, if it weren't for the a hundred thousand dollars of revenue per employee, at a certain point, that story sounded like season two of Breaking Bad. The HVAC, the cap ex, oh you mean a hundred thousand dollars per employee per week? Okay. Alex Dupler (00:31:18): No, no, no, per year. Rob Collie (00:31:19): Then it's meth. Alex Dupler (00:31:20): Yeah, no. So this is the environmental testing industry. And the way it works is your tests have to be defensible to the EPA. So the EPA puts up a spec and says the test needs to be done this way. And when it's done, it has these parameters in terms of statistical reusability. And that means that one lab's product is a commodity compared to the other lab's product. And so you can't get outside profits. All you can do is compete on service and price. And if you take a high CapEx business and bolted to professional services, you're not going to get good margins. Rob Collie (00:31:59): Unintended consequences of everything, right? Alex Dupler (00:32:01): Yeah. I mean, Rob, can you imagine your business, if you are charging professional services business model, but you bolted on a whole, huge amount of consumable costs to every delivery? Rob Collie (00:32:14): Yeah. It sounds like we can safely not choose the wine in front of me. Alex Dupler (00:32:19): That's how I first encountered the 2017 standalone web, maybe it was 2016. The first time power BI was split out. I was doing office 365 admins and I got like a push notification. I was like, "This is cool." And I built some stuff and I showed it to my manager and he was like, "That's cool. How much is it?" "$10 a month." "Nope, can't afford it." And that's when I started looking for jobs anywhere where they had good Excel people. Rob Collie (00:32:46): Yeah, and to put that in perspective, this is the punchline to many jokes when people ask us how much it is. We go, "It's $10 a month per user." We all just start laughing. Like, "Oh my God, it's like stealing. It's so cheap." Alex Dupler (00:32:58): I didn't even have that many users. Rob Collie (00:33:02): I mean, this might be $30 a month. You know, like, nope. Alex Dupler (00:33:06): No. Rob Collie (00:33:07): It's like when we first moved to Cleveland back in the day, it was right in the middle of the financial crisis. We were looking at real estate and everything. And there were houses for sale in Cleveland for $10,000, like $10,000. And I started laughing. I'm like, imagine the deal going down. This house has been on the market for 180 days at $10,000. And you come in and say, "Look, I've got a cash offer. I'm willing to pay asking price. But the grill out back? You need to leave it." And the owner's like, "Mmmmm." Alex Dupler (00:33:43): My wife's best friend lives in Cleveland and they recently bought a house. And so we looked at a bunch of Zillow listings. I'm like, "Oh man, we could pay cash. Move next door." And they're sort of north of the Cleveland Clinic, that super nice neighborhood up in there. I was like, "Oh yeah, we could buy a very nice house, but our family is not there." Also, have you looked at the weather? It's not Seattle. Rob Collie (00:34:05): No, it's not Seattle, but I'll tell you what, here's an interesting description of statistics. When we moved to Cleveland, it wasn't because we wanted to, it was because basically my kids had been taken to Cleveland and so we're trying to console ourselves. We're like, "Okay, well, okay. It's going to be colder. There's going to be snow. Okay, okay. But at least it isn't going to be as overcast." And then we looked it up and Cleveland has more overcast days per year than Seattle. So we were like, "Damn, that sucks." However, it turns out that the definition of overcast days is very, very, very important. Because like an overcast day in Cleveland is like 75% of the sky is covered by clouds. That's an overcast day. At no point in time ever is Cleveland under a one mile thick, oppressive blanket that starves you, where you don't even have any idea where the sun is in the sky. So number of days is one of those misleading statistics. Total amount of oppressive cloud cover needs to be a different statistic. Trust me, there's more sun in Cleveland on an ongoing basis than there is in Seattle. Those winter and fall months, man, those are rough. Alex Dupler (00:35:16): That's not the part that bothers me. I was born and raised in Seattle. It's the shoveling your driveway in March, that part of it. Rob Collie (00:35:24): You could just be the delinquents that we were and just get a four wheel drive vehicle and say, "Screw it." Alex Powers (00:35:31): You don't shovel in March. After February, you don't shovel. It's in my contract. I don't shovel after March 1st. That's it. Because it's going to melt. Alex Dupler (00:35:40): Eventually. Alex Powers (00:35:40): It'll melt by the end of the month. Rob Collie (00:35:43): By the end of the month. Alex Powers (00:35:44): By the end of the month, it'll be gone. The rainstorm's coming. Sunshine's going to happen. I ain't shoveling. No, I put that in my contract years ago. Rob Collie (00:35:53): Cleveland's where I learned the rule, we do not adopt dogs that require walking. Alex Powers (00:35:58): Yes. Rob Collie (00:35:58): They need to be able to go out in the backyard and come back in. I fell so many times on ice. I eventually got, they're like crampons essentially. Alex Dupler (00:36:06): Yak tracks? Rob Collie (00:36:08): Yak tracks, that's what they are. Yak tracks or something else. You can't intentionally slip on yak tracks. It's crazy. But without them, just any day now broken hip. Alex Dupler (00:36:19): Our friends that lived there, they just got a golden retriever. We met the puppy when we were visiting with them this summer. Very cute, but I think they have some of those walks in their future. Rob Collie (00:36:29): So you start looking for a job, that's what led you into Mount Redmond? Alex Dupler (00:36:34): Yeah, I literally went looking for jobs good with Excel in Seattle. I found a contract position into Microsoft, making sure that the salespeople were assigned to the right customers and got paid on the right quota because advertising the agency model, it makes that much more complicated. Because we were in this model where we'd try and keep all the customers of an agency with the same salesperson which makes a lot of sense, especially when you're the underdog and you have relatively few sales resources, you get more leverage. But customer's change agencies all the time, have no respect for our compensation cycles, and so it was quite the nightmare. Rob Collie (00:37:15): Yeah, I love that. Like, so here's how we'll define the world for our benefit, "Oh world, you did not get the message. World, please don't change. Don't have your own things going on." Yep, that sounds like a software engineering problem from the nineties back before the industry kind of got wiser. So you start talking about the show. It seems like with a format like that, it's got to wander, which is what our show does too, by the way. So what are some of the most entertaining or valuable corners that you found yourself wandering into over time? Alex Powers (00:37:48): I'm still excited with our first episode where we talked about kind of beyond the desktop where it's no longer just development in [inaudible 00:37:56] desktop. It now almost takes like five different applications to build something at scale, which is like a good and bad thing. Well, you're getting more tools, seeing new things faster, more performing, et cetera, but why do I need 10 tools? Can we solve that within the desktop application? And we just had a really good conversation, a lot of attendees there, providing their own thoughts. And it kind of comes back to like this overwhelming feeling of learning power BI it's. Like I have to learn 20 new things all the time, learning, learning, learning. It's just never ending. That was my key episode. Alex Dupler (00:38:26): I agree. I mean, I think that's been the central theme of the whole show. I mean, we did that first episode and then we've talked, we've had the same conversation about these tools in so many different contexts. What are the different ways to do dev ops in power BI? What are different ways to measure how you're doing in terms of the effectiveness of your models? And so all of that is sort of external to the desktop application. Alex Powers (00:38:52): I think the best part, too, is that we're not from these traditional backgrounds of 20 years of BI or 20 years of kind of dev ops. We're learning this real time, sharing our experiences of, Rob, I think you call us power users or business users that find these tools, that get empowered by this technology. That is the seat in which we sit in. Hey, I found Excel 2010 power query add in 2013, 2016. I'm fighting with my IT admins. Can you please just upgrade to the next monthly release that will solve all my problems? Where Alex D is on the other series fighting tooth and nail for a 2007 license. It's kind of funny to hear that conversation. Rob Collie (00:39:32): $10 a month. We need those charity commercials like Sally Struthers used to do. This is Alex Dupler. For $10 a month, less than the price of a cup of coffee, you could get him an O 365 license. Alex Dupler (00:39:50): Yeah. So we ended up getting some E3 licenses and some E1 licenses, which meant I could work in power query, not using my personal license, but using the company's license. And then when I tried to share it with my coworkers, they only had E1. They couldn't use desktop. They had to use power query online or Excel online. And there was no power query online. And so even once we sort of modernized, we installed like a windows server 2012 and it was already 2015 and I was okay, this is our modernization. Alex Powers (00:40:26): So Rob, I'm going to steal one of your quotes here if you don't mind. Rob Collie (00:40:30): No, please do. We have an open source quote license at P3. Alex Powers (00:40:35): Well, I'll buy you a 2007 Excel license too, if I have to. Rob Collie (00:40:39): Fantastic. Alex Powers (00:40:39): But one of the items you had said a long time ago, I believe it was either in your book or maybe some of the video recordings you used to do in the studio with a nice button up shirt. You said, "There are two types of people when it comes to technology, those who can see the possibilities and bring about change and those who are about to be affected by it." And I always look at this and I look at things like had kind of talked about with the Excel users who haven't even gotten to this experience yet. There is still somebody out there today that is using Excel 2007 and their employer or their this, their that, or whatever their situation they're red is like, "I just see this little rectangle. It hasn't changed. Why do you want me to go invest in any of this stuff?" Like how often are you still seeing this? Rob Collie (00:41:17): Anecdotally in our public classes, which I haven't taught in a while, I've taught one as recently as let's say two years ago. And when I taught public classes for P3, I still stubbornly insisted on using the Excel version of this stuff to teach. Again, because of that onboarding effect. Alex Powers (00:41:34): Yep. Rob Collie (00:41:34): I think I was the only one left at our company that was still stubbornly doing that and I wasn't bothering to argue with others and whatever. So I did this for years, probably the first one of those classes I taught would have been like in 2011. So fighting with different versions of Excel, all the different students showed up with, for a long time, that was like a quarter of the class. The instructions for the class were very clear, show up with this version or don't bother. And they'd show up and no, they had a version, didn't even have power pivot and couldn't get power pivot. And so it was so bad for a while, we would bring spare laptops. If we traveled to another city, we'd be lugging spare laptops with us and they'd just be there ready to go like the hot swap with a student. That problem really went away though. I reached the point where I'd survey everybody at the beginning of class, "What version of Excel are you on," or whatever. And everyone, every single person in the class would be on the basically some version of recent 365. Rob Collie (00:42:32): I really do think that the person who's trapped on 2007 or hell even 2010 or 2013, they're out there, but they are really a tiny, tiny fraction of the world now. Whereas that used to be an overwhelming problem. So it's really testament to how successful O 365. Alex Powers (00:42:52): I would agree. Rob Collie (00:42:53): It's like, I was kind of like cynically betting against it forever, like the tortoise and the hare. Like I woke up one day and that's the world. The world is O 365. I think everyone's on the modern, not everyone, but it rounds to everyone, is on the modern wave of the tools. But they're still shocked when I show them, when we show them, "Did you know that this is in here?" And they're just like, "What?" Alex Powers (00:43:19): How is that in here? Rob Collie (00:43:20): They get angry because they start to realize how much of their life they have lost by not being told. Alex Powers (00:43:27): What I was always seeing was people had to live in two worlds. Like I went to some of the Excel boot camps, Michael Alexander, absolutely transformed on my personal laptop. I'm having the best time of my life in these three-day boot camps. I'm loving, loving, loving. At the very end though, I have to go back to work on Monday. I saw what could be, and I'm now back to what is. And it's just very difficult to kind of live in that middle space. For those that are still out there and listening to this, Hey, look at your surroundings. Hopefully Office 365 is coming within your organization. But if not, kind of like Alex D's story, I just went looked somewhere else. I saw the future that was coming, and I bet it all myself and I went for it. And I think that me and him both kind of share those stories, too. Alex Dupler (00:44:08): Inside of Microsoft, in my little corner of the Microsoft that most people in Microsoft don't even know about, I put together a class that I've given a couple of times, Modern Excel for Managers. And basically I would just show them power query and X Lookup. We didn't even talk about Dax. But just to like get them thinking like, "Hey, if you're doing some annoying thing in Excel, maybe there's a couple ways to make it a little bit better. Maybe you've never even seen the formula bar before." I had one person that I worked with who I was like, I didn't handle it very well at first. But she was like, "Can you add these numbers together for me?" And I was like, "Yeah." Alex Powers (00:44:52): Just a standard Excel formula bar? Is that what you're talking about? Alex Dupler (00:44:55): She was like, "Can you show me the difference between these two numbers?" "I can do that for you, but here, let me come over here and show you something." Rob Collie (00:45:04): So there was another program manager on being, because I was such an Excel, I'd come from the Excel team, I'm such an Excel zealot, that all someone had to do was say that they needed Excel help and I was there. Alex Powers (00:45:17): Oh yeah. Rob Collie (00:45:18): This person, they developed a habit of having me do all of their Excel work for them. This is one of my peers. And then of course passing off the work as their own. Fine, I wasn't that career minded, really. Six months after this is when I volunteered to no longer be a manager. So climbing the corporate ladder wasn't some voracious appetite of mine. So, okay, fine, fine. I knew what was happening, but I was still okay because the Excel problems were so fun. Keep them coming. Then one day this person asked me for Excel help. And there were these two columns of numbers. And this person had subtracted column two from column one to create column three and then added up column three to get the difference. Alex Powers (00:46:04): I'm waiting for the reveal, because there's a big story here and I'm loving it right. Rob Collie (00:46:09): I said, "Well, you know, you could have just summed column one and column two, and then taken the difference between the two sums." And they said, "But wouldn't the answer be different?" There was this moment of silence. I'm looking. I'm looking at them. They're looking at me. I'm looking at them. They're looking at me. At that moment, they realized that they couldn't use me anymore because I was now dangerous. I now knew that they didn't know math. They didn't just not know spreadsheets, they didn't know math. They were exposed. This person is now an executive at Google. Tom LaRock (00:46:48): This person being the executive at Google. I have no doubt probably doesn't know math. However, as somebody who uses technology and knows that data can be dirty and whatnot, I would actually, if it was me Rob, I would say do it both ways and make sure the answers match. Because you know what? We both seen it where it didn't work out. Rob Collie (00:47:10): That's true. But like when you see all the numbers in front of you, you physically see them all. You've got access. There's nothing hidden going on here. Oh, by the way, Tom, what's your degree in again? Tom LaRock (00:47:21): I have a master's in mathematics from Washington State University. Rob Collie (00:47:23): Masters, yep. Yeah, the masters in math is what allows Tom to say, "I'm not sure." Tom LaRock (00:47:29): Now hold on. Hold on. We've seen it. We've seen it. Rob Collie (00:47:35): There's a name for this. It's like the distributive property or associative property or something. There's some property that we learned in middle school. Tom LaRock (00:47:41): See, that's math with paper and pencil. Now we're talking about using Excel for math. So the tool, there could be something like, "Hey wait," and that's why we tell you, "well, just do it both ways." Even Wayne Winston would probably say, "Yeah, well have two columns. They should match. If they don't match..." Rob Collie (00:47:58): No, no he would not, not in this particular case. Tom LaRock (00:48:01): You're right. He wouldn't. Rob Collie (00:48:02): Every time I tell this story, someone always sort of like takes a sympathetic stance towards the antagonist and I end up feeling like a heel. Tom LaRock (00:48:09): You shouldn't. You shouldn't. Rob Collie (00:48:12): But come on. Tom LaRock (00:48:15): I'm with you. I have no doubt that they don't know math because I come across the same people. I do. Rob Collie (00:48:22): It's think it's the intersection of all of those things, That I was being used the whole time. Tom LaRock (00:48:27): Yes. Rob Collie (00:48:29): Which I had kind of made my peace with. But then on top of that, this incredibly aggressive ladder climber, the kind of person who really was kind of like willing to climb over the bodies of their colleagues. There's something delicious about, even though I was the rube in the whole story up until a certain point. I was being taken advantage of and I knew it. But even me in that situation, there was that moment of just like jaw dropping dumbstruck, like just looking at this person going, "Oh my God, you did not do that." Alex Powers (00:49:09): I'm going to lift us up from the depths here of career and everything else. I thought you were going to take us into that they didn't use cell references, which I've seen people type in column A plus column B's value in an equals. And it's like, "Well, why didn't you just do A1 plus B1?" Mind was blown. So I love that those moments still exist and you find them out in the wild every once in a while. And it's not massive warehouse MPP processing, et cetera, et cetera, that everyone's like, "Oh, this is the," I call it the BI bubble. Everyone's out here living in the BI bubble, writing C sharp, doing tabular and coding, blah, blah, blah. People are still excited about the very simple things that technology can achieve for them. Alex Dupler (00:49:56): My in-laws, they own a brewery in Rinton and they make great beer. I offered to help my mother-in-law with some of her bookkeeping that she does on inventory. And she was showing me how she was doing it. And she was like, "Okay, I get these numbers in Excel. And then I get out my calculator." And I was like, "Okay, let me show you how you can do this differently." And I showed her. She was like, "No, no, that's going to be too hard. I'm going to stick with the calculator." And I was like, "Okay, that's fine." Alex Powers (00:50:20): I still get the, "I don't trust Excel, so I double check with the calculator." Rob Collie (00:50:25): My first exposure to that, I was in college. I was working for a construction management firm that was building the new chemistry building on Vanderbilt campus and I was working in the management trailer. I was sort of all purpose ... we called me the lackey. I would just do whatever anybody needed. Sometimes I'd go out in the building and take measurements for things or whatever. But most of the time, I was just doing paperwork and stuff. They turned over the spreadsheet for this latest change order to the project to Vanderbilt management. And the price tag, it was an Excel spreadsheet and it had a column of values that were summed and there was a number at the bottom of it. And I remember the guy Tony who worked for Vanderbilt going, "Well, someone's going to have to double check these numbers. We can't just pay this contract." And my boss was just looking at him going, "Come on. That's what the spreadsheet is for is for doing that." And Tony's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But still, I mean, we can't just pay this number." I can understand that stance a little better, anyway, I just looked like a giant meany. But remember. This was someone who was taking advantage of me. Alex Powers (00:51:36): I agree. I agree. Alex Dupler (00:51:38): One of the things that I wanted to touch on in this conversation, something you've brought up a lot, which is going from BI to taking action within the report. And I got to tell you, this concept terrifies me. As a BIPM, I'm terrified of it. And I totally agree that the value is there, but in the BI space, we are really bad at testing. And if I think about how going from, Hey, I've got a report and these are the numbers to someone's going to click a button and it's going to change something in a system of record, the level of quality and testing goes up and I think really threatens the quick solution thing that you've also talked about is your bread and butter of like, Hey, we're going to do this really fast and it's going to blow your mind. But if I got to throw all that testing in there to make sure I don't blow up your source system instead, I don't know how those two things coexist. Rob Collie (00:52:39): Yeah. that's a fair point. I mean, for a moment there, when you were saying the taking action part and this terrifies you, before I understood the subtleties of your point, I was going to make the joke like, "Oh, you want this to be like the psychic hotline. It's for entertainment purposes only. Please don't use this report to take any action." Alex Dupler (00:52:57): It does make my job easier, I will admit, but it is a little bit more nuanced than that. Rob Collie (00:53:02): Okay, okay, fine. So anyway, I still managed to sneak the joke in there without ... it's not a joke at your expense because your point is different. Okay, there's escalating versions of this with escalating versions of responsibility and test implications and things like that. So you can just start with report design and working backwards from the types of action, your constituents, the users of your report. In classes what I would teach this concept on the end of the last day, as sort of like a religious sermon. I would encourage people to think of the users of their reports as each one of them sitting in front of like some gigantic cartoonish bat computer looking thing with these giant oversized 1960s, pop art colored buttons and they're labeled things like "open more stores" or "adjust hours of locations" or "increase head count, reduce head count" or "change product mix" or whatever. It's actually kind of interesting, when you imagine e ... Rob Collie (00:54:03): ... mixed or whatever, right? It's actually interesting when you imagine it that way to give it that physical manifestation, it actually becomes a little bit easier, for me anyway, to imagine what these people can do, because every role in a company really has a finite number of actions that they can take. Now, finite in terms of their categories of actions. It's certainly infinite when you get into the details of what are you going to do. And if you start to think of them from that perspective and you think, okay, what I should do is build reports that advise them or at least are helping inform them as to which control they should touch on their dashboard and directionally which way they should move it. Rob Collie (00:54:45): And it sounds like not that important of a trick, not that powerful of a trick, but if you actually apply that methodology faithfully, you end up with a vastly different portfolio of reports that you have built. Even I, very often, don't live up to my own principle in this regard. Because it's so easy. It's so seductively easy. It's the path of least resistance to grab all the data, load it up, make the model, that's fun, and then it's like flowing downhill. It's just like, oh, this is the easy and fun part, right? And then inevitably, you just start slapping together some reports. And those reports, in some ways, are just exposing the coolness of what you've built. Rob Collie (00:55:29): Now, that still leads to some very, very useful things. That's mind-blowingly better than what you ended up with in the old dark ages of Excel or even traditional BI. But I mean, oh my God, we were just talking about it on the last podcast. Some of the things that I have seen in the world that were supposed to be helping people make decisions were better described as their opponents in the process. This report was something that you had to fight to figure out what you should do at your dashboard. Rob Collie (00:55:59): So even before we start with any sort of actual software integration and taking action and things like that, that's a really, I think, important religion to develop. And again, when you're at your best, your absolute gold medal in the Olympics celebrated by the world best, maybe 30% of your output will live up to this. You just can't, you can't execute that way all the time. It's really, really hard. But it's software development. You are building software when you're building reports. You should have the same sort of mindset, if you can, as the Power BI team has when they sit down to design a new feature in their software. Alex Dupler (00:56:38): I totally agree. One of the questions I've been asking a lot, because I've been working on reports for the salespeople to take to the customers is, what is the conversation you're going to have with the customer? Not, what is the metric, but how does this fit into the conversation? And part of this is because my superpower and my career is going and building tools for the thing I used to do. And I think a lot of BI people come from that, where they were in the business and they were doing a thing, they just started making the reports for that thing. And somewhere along the line, they either work away from it for too long or they solve those problems. They had to learn how to make reports for something they haven't done for years. And I think that's a difficult transition and one I've been going through. Alex Dupler (00:57:26): But yeah, learning how to ask questions of the user, because they're not just going to tell you... what they tell you isn't what they need. You have to learn how to learn from what they say, what they actually want. Rob Collie (00:57:42): Yeah, it's a fine art. And by the way, when you've been in "BI", building the same reports for a long time, generally speaking, looking backwards anyway, those reports also sucked because they were constrained by what was possible at the time. And so they were never very ambitious. And most of those reports amounted to... A lot of times they just amounted to the data dump import that's used for something else. It's just, again, it's the opponent. It's better than nothing, but it's meager, meager help. And suddenly you're given this brand new tool set that's capable of so much more. Rob Collie (00:58:22): And unfortunately what I see a lot of times, when you give Power BI to an IT department, they go, "Oh hot damn, the new SSRS." This is the new reporting services. We're going to use it like reporting services. Load that big one flat wide table and pigeonhole it as visualization. It's just like, "Come on." Alex Powers (00:58:45): I'm telling you my favorite DAX is always written from the IT department. It's just written like a massive sequel statement, 400 lines. None of it makes any sense. It's like, "Can we just calculate, maybe another table here or there." Alex Dupler (00:58:59): The folks coming from the IT department, the one thing they do have going for them is that they did learn to format their code. Sometimes people coming from the Excel world, they learned that they can't format their code. And so I'm not sure that I would agree that the worst DAX comes from the IT department. Because you take a DAX statement and you take all the formatting out, and you've just made it 10 times worse. Alex Powers (00:59:21): From readability, yeah, I would agree. Rob Collie (00:59:24): I gave a talk one time where I asked the trick question of, what's the number one programming language in the world? And

Beyonce, Prince, Madonna...Like so many of these iconic one word name celebrities in the music world, Chandoo is as unique and talented as they come in the data world!  His story is quite inspiring, his heart and soul are warm, and his brain is brimming with great ideas! All Things Chandoo: Chandoo.Org Chandoo's Youtube Power BI Playdate Budget VS Actual Articles Some Creators and Channels that inspire Chandoo: ElectroBoom Weezy Waiter Hybrid Calisthenics Ali Abdaal  References in this episode: Mike Miskell Tribute To The Wolf Episode Timeline: 4:40 - Chandoo's introduction to Excel was born from necessity (like many of us!), The birth of Chandoo.org (often imitated, never duplicated), and the uniqueness of Chandoo that makes him a huge success 31:50 - Chandoo's Excel Dashboarding is exquisite, his transition to Power BI, and what really matters in one's career 54:10 - Chandoo the Excel celebrity and the Power BI celebrity, Lambda functions, and a curveball question for Chandoo about working for Microsoft 1:06:25 - Chandoo and Rob cross paths, Chandoo's iconic hair, the Game-Changing features of Power BI, and some Power BI hacks 1:33:45 - What's next for Chandoo? Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Think for a moment about the people that you're aware of, who only go by a single word name. They're usually musicians, Prince, Madonna, Cher, Beyonce. There are a couple of non-musician examples that come to mind like Oprah, for instance. These tend to be celebrities on the world stage. Well, today's guest is the rare exception that pulls that off within the Excel, Power BI, and data community. And I'm talking, of course, about Chandoo. Chandoo is one of the completely original early stage MVP-type celebrities within our community. He blazed a path that now hundreds, if not thousands of people have followed. And sometimes with things like this, it's really that first-mover advantage that really sets someone apart and he did, in fact, have that kind of first-mover advantage. But he is still, to this day, so incredibly unique that I challenge anyone to actually truly duplicate him. Rob Collie (00:01:06): He is legitimately one of a kind. And for me, he's been there literally since the beginning, even physically, since the beginning. He and his family came to live near us in the United States for a summer. That first summer after which I had formed P3 as a company. With someone as gifted as Chandoo, it's always easy and tempting to sort of assume that they've always been doing what they're doing. And he is very gifted, but it's not like those gifts, where always from the beginning, oriented towards something like Excel. Just like many of us, he had to have his collides with moment, the moment where you bounce off of Excel or you stick to it and obviously, he's stuck. So, of course, we go back to and explore that origin story. And also, like many professionals in this space, Chandoo has, over the years, branched out from Excel into Power BI, creating such wonderful offerings like the Power BI Play Date, which we talk about a little bit. Rob Collie (00:02:07): So, we talk about that, what it's like coming from the Excel background and digging into Power BI. He had some unexpected observations there that once I heard them, I was just nodding. "Yep. Yep. That's right." And that conversation also then led to a familiar conclusion that again, I wouldn't have expected from Chandoo, but of course, I should have. And another part of the conversation, we also talked about where he looked for inspiration, where he looked for stimulation and new ideas. It was great to catch up with an old friend, who was also just a wise and dynamic soul. So, without further preamble, let's get into it. Announcer (00:02:48): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast, with your host, Rob Collie and your cohost, Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:03:12): Welcome to the show, the one and only Chandoo, how are you? Chandoo (00:03:17): I am doing good, Rob. How are you? Rob Collie (00:03:19): Fantastic. Been looking forward to this for a while. We've been trying to schedule this for probably three or four months now. And here we are like a power reserve. We saved a Chandoo interview very carefully for that six months over the podcast. Actually, how many months are we in now, Luke? Is this our 10th month? Luke (00:03:37): Start on October, early October. Rob Collie (00:03:40): We're potentially in our 10th month. That's what we do. We lose track of time. You're one of the sort of original internet celebrity instructors, often imitated. There's a lot of people who I've seen, sort of explicitly trying to follow in your footsteps and to varying degrees of success. You're not a formula that really others can follow because there really is, and this is awesome to say this. There really is only one you. I've learned that when we actually met. I didn't know that over the internet. How'd you get started on Excel? That was the beginning, right? Chandoo (00:04:22): It's a long story, but that's what we're here for, anyway. Rob Collie (00:04:25): That's right. Chandoo (00:04:26): So, I first remember using Excel all the way back in 2000. There were times before that I used it, but 2003 is the first real moment in my life when I actually used Excel for something. And this is not even to do anything with what I'm doing nowadays with Excel or Power BI. So, the reason why I use it at that point in life is I was preparing for some computer exams. So, I just finished my graduate studies in computer science, and I started working, but simultaneously, I was preparing for some MBA exams. And in India, there is a lot of competition when it comes to getting into a good college for doing your masters. So, they have all these highly competitive exams where sometimes, upwards of 200,000 people will take the exam and just about 500, 600 people will actually be admitted into the college. Rob Collie (00:05:20): Wow. As like a 0.1% acceptance rate. Chandoo (00:05:25): Yeah. You look at the Ivy League and other top university acceptance rates and then, take it to India. Then, it is nowhere near, like you'd be amazed at the craziness that goes on with some of these places. There are a couple of reasons like India has billion people, right? Obviously, there's lots of competition. On top, there were fewer universities at that point of time. The government has added many more now, but still, with our number of people, it is very less compared. So, there is all these factors for that reason. The competition is very high. As part of preparation strategy, everybody would go and take a lot of extra lessons outside just to learn how to prepare for the exam. And then, they'll take these mock examinations sometimes upwards of 25 or 50 in a year just to prepare for the real thing. And there's only one real thing that's a physical thing at that time. Chandoo (00:06:19): So, you can't really make mistakes when the real exam happens, but you have all the luxury of making mistakes in this mock-up stage or that you can learn. And because there is a lot of data coming in from all these exams, right? When I take an exam, there's like 200 questions or 150 questions and I would attempt some. I'll get some right, some wrong. I could use Excel to just keep track of what I'm doing in these exams, what mistakes I'm making, and if I spot a pattern like this automatic question, I'm making the same mistake again and again, then I will change my study of course to plan and address that particular gap or try to change my strategy, so that I won't attempt that area of questions and instead, focus my time on other things. Chandoo (00:07:01): So, that's really when I used Excel and I made this massive spreadsheet just to keep track of what I was doing in those exams. And it kind of really helped me finally get a good grade in that and get into college for my masters. But obviously, you can say Excel is built for anything and everything. So, that was one of the use cases, but I was not really using any of the formulas or none of the power of Excel. And I didn't even know what it is capable of, but that was the one vivid memory of Excel early on. Rob Collie (00:07:35): Do you still have a copy of that spreadsheet somewhere? Chandoo (00:07:38): Many people ask me this. This is simply because back in 2003, 2004, internet is still kind of very nascent in India. It started off as a Yahoo Group. I don't know if you remember, like Yahoo Groups. It's like a collaboration. Rob Collie (00:07:52): I do. Chandoo (00:07:53): But then later on, the forums were a big thing. So, 2003 was the time when in India, we have these preparatory forums where many of us who are all over the country would log in there once in a while, share our stories of how we are preparing, what we are doing, what is going on right, what is going on wrong. So, we could all learn from each other and collaborate, and win this exam. So, I posted a story of how I prepared when I finished the exam and the spreadsheet was part of that story. And then, many people asked us, "Can we get a copy of this?" But in those days, I didn't even have internet at my home. I would go to my workplace to submit something to this forum. So, the spreadsheet was in my home computer and I think I lost it. I don't think I have it anywhere, or it's probably still in my Yahoo Mail. The password of which I no longer remember, or even use. It's gone. Rob Collie (00:08:46): So much of things like that from that era, for me, even though I had great internet at the time, so many of those things are lost because we didn't really have the cloud file storage yet. Today, anything that I ever think is even remotely, possibly valuable, immediately gets saved to Dropbox. I've got terabytes of Dropbox space that I'm never going to ever use in my life. So, everything is saved past a certain point. But before that, it's kind of almost like in geology, it's below this certain rock layer where the earth just kind of ground, everything's gone. So, it makes sense that it's gone. Do you remember how many columns were in that spreadsheet? Roughly, was it question number and right or wrong answer, that kind of thing? Was that what it was? Chandoo (00:09:33): It's not exactly like that. It was not even structured that way because I didn't even know how to use Excel at that point. I think I started off putting stuff in a notepad file or something. And then, I thought, "Man, this sucks because there is no way to visually see or identify things here." So just, I opened an Excel spreadsheet and started putting it there. This is not a podcast on that exam, but that exam used to have like four or five different sections. It is all quite random. You wouldn't believe, there is no set pattern or anything. The number of questions, number of sections, everything could change at any point. Chandoo (00:10:07): There is no official director that these are the things that you would be tested, but the general outline is you would have questions on English, you'd have questions on mathematics. And then, the mathematics itself is split into couple of areas. So, one is arithmetic and then the other is it's called logical reasoning. And then, sometimes, they would further split that into understanding data and graphs and making business decisions from it. So, three or four sections, essentially. So, there's, I think, four big columns. Some of them had further split into multiple columns based on what the heck I was doing. If I think, "Oh, maybe I should keep track of this." Then, I would just put something there and fill some color in there just to remind me what it is. Rob Collie (00:10:51): My daughter is, right now, in the middle of taking the college entrance exams, SAT and ACT here in the United States, and it would never occur to me to spreadsheet. And she's trying to get her scores to a particular level to get to a particular college, right? It takes some effort. It would still never have occurred to me. And now, I'm wondering if it should have. Never have occurred to me to make a spreadsheet, where she's performing well and where some opportunity to raise score. Chandoo (00:11:18): They probably have access to better tools and apps and stuff like that these days. But yeah, a spreadsheet is the original app, I think. Rob Collie (00:11:27): Yeah, it is. It is. I think that necessity is so often the spark. The Olympics just wrapped up. You watch these events where everyone looks like they're doing exactly the same thing. They're using exactly the same form. And then, it's like a couple of millimeters or something that separates the gold medalist from the fifth place. The expert watching says, "Oh, see right here where this person's little toe kind of flaps the wrong way. That was a big mistake." That's what costs them. And it kind of seems like that when there's 200,000 people competing for a few hundred spots. It's like that, right? Like one question is going to drop your rank by potentially thousands of people. Chandoo (00:12:12): Yeah, totally right. Rob Collie (00:12:13): The pressure. Chandoo (00:12:14): There is a lot of pressure and I think, it is probably one of those formative things in my life, too, that having been through that journey. So the exam, I took it during my final year of college because I thought I know why go and work for some time. I might just finish my graduation and then, just go for post-grad. But I didn't get anywhere near the required cutoff to actually go in and make it for the colleges. So, and I felt really bad because I thought all this was like something that I would easily get. Chandoo (00:12:44): I used to have this self-perception that, "Yes, I'm awesome." In college, you are in a bubble, right? You're not really aware of this wider world out there where there's another 195,000 people who are also writing this. So, that was the wakening call for me. And then I thought, "Oh man, I need to actually sit and strategize this and prepare for it." Like I'm attacking this rather than just wake up and go and right. So, that's preparation became a real thing and I prioritize that, set aside time for it every day. And then, we'll track the shit out of it every day, really. Rob Collie (00:13:20): Yeah. Like I've told this story on this podcast before, but it's metaphorical. I go out to a field day, almost like miniature Olympics for a middle school. I was probably like in eighth grade, and I was going to run this race. It's one lap around the track, which to me seems like a distance race. Your kids can be a fast jog and that starting gun went off and I come out in the fast jog and the other guys are all sprinting from the very beginning. And there's this moment of realization like, "Oh, it's going to be like that." Next thing you know, I'm sprinting. I think I've experienced multiple junctures in my life that are like this. You think you're just going to go and do your thing and just be yourself and be excellent and just be your own self-image that you've very carefully curated for yourself without realizing it. And then, the real world goes, "Oh no, uh-uh (negative). That's not going to cut it." It's a real shock, isn't it? Chandoo (00:14:22): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:14:22): I've had many of those. Chandoo (00:14:24): And I think, that is necessary, especially, probably if you get that kind of a shock too late in your life, you might be too set in your ways to change anything. But when you are becoming an adult, when you are still forming your opinions and ideas about the world, having as much of these experiences as needed is very much necessary, I feel. I mean, even today, I would welcome that kind of things. But growing up, I look back and I think, "Ah, man, that was really what made me who I am today." Rob Collie (00:14:54): Microsoft was a big moment like that for me. That was a moment that lasted years. That was a bad one. I still have all kinds of relatively civil disagreements with my ex-wife about raising our teens. And I'm always of the opinion that like, "Oh no, no, no. The earlier they can experience failure, the better because the consequences are lower. The amortized benefit over time is greater." She's of the opposite. She's there to catch them and prevent any sort of failure, very proactively avoiding failure for them. And I'm like, "Oh no, no, no, no, let them fall. It's it's good for them." Chandoo (00:15:38): I feel like maybe, I have lucked out. I mean, obviously, every parent is so protective of their child, but early on, I think when I was in fifth class, which is like year five in school, I was sent to a boarding school and I never really went back home. I just bumped it from one boarding school to boarding college, to uni, which is also not my place. So, I was never really around my parents for them to kind of catch me if I make stupid choices. It was all like, "You figure it out." And this is all in late '90s, early 2000s when there is no internet, no mobile phone. I still remember, if I ran out of the money, I would have to write a letter, post it, and this would take minimum of three days unless I do some sort of an express mailing, which obviously costs more. Chandoo (00:16:27): So, I'd go for the cheapest thing, postcard. And then, I'll go to my home three days later and they would have to money order the money. There's no bank account concept also. So, they'll have to send it through a postal money order. So, there's actually a lag of like seven or sometimes upwards of 10 days time. And sometimes, they may not even have the money. They might say, Oh wait, we'll send it to you after the first week of the month or whatever." It's all like, yeah. You figure it out, really. Rob Collie (00:16:56): Yeah. There's a week of maybe not eating. Chandoo (00:17:01): You'll have to figure it out. That's pretty much it. Rob Collie (00:17:04): That's it, yeah. All right. So, that was your first brush with it, like for real. But then, obviously, later, your Twitter handle, is it still r1c1? Chandoo (00:17:15): Yes, it is. I wouldn't let go of that. Rob Collie (00:17:18): No, that is an awesome one. I mean, even people who use Excel a lot don't always know about R1C1 notation. So, you end up in a very different strata of Excel skill. At some point later, you ended up in a number of other countries at one point, right? Like you were moving around the world, working for, was a consulting firm. Chandoo (00:17:40): Yeah. I think the real shift to Excel began a little later, especially after I finished my post-graduation. I started working as a consultant with one of the biggest technology companies in India and they basically go around the world, help other companies do their IT better. And it's a very large company. And I was working within the finance and insurance vertical of that company. Obviously, I am not really there to develop software because my role there is to understand what the clients want, translate that into technical terms, so that the software developers, designers, and testers can do their job. So, essentially, I'm a business analyst and it's a fancy word of saying that you would be using PowerPoint and Excel every day. That's pretty much what I was doing. I was building a lot of models, making presentations, taking complex concepts, and simplifying them into Word or Excel, so developers can take that and do their job better. Chandoo (00:18:39): So, early on, I realized, "Man, if I don't know Excel, I'm going to just stay behind in this job." And that's not something that they teach in college. The college is all about, how do you prepare marketing strategy for the fortune, 500 company? And here I am, just sitting in the cubicle, figuring out, "Oh, how do I analyze this? And how do I figure out what's going on with these bunch of projects so that we could improve something?" So, Excel became the real world application that I would use six to eight hours every day. And there were all these colleagues right next to me who do all these amazing models in Excel to figure out the costing for a project or all sorts of things. And I would know nothing about that and I felt really bad. Chandoo (00:19:21): But early on in that job, I was not really doing anything worthwhile. I was just kind of like an apprentice. So, I would only do odd jobs. So, I had a lot of, you could say free time, but I would think that as learning time. So, all I would do is I'd open up Excel. I'd click on random buttons to see, "Oh, what this does. Oh, indirect function, what this would do." So, that got me really curious and I started building some silly things for my personal life, like I'll bill a budget in Excel just to understand how things work, how to make it better. And at one point, I thought, I steadily bumped into something that looks so interesting. And I thought nobody in the world would know about this. I felt like, and I discovered something and they already had my chandoo.org website by then because I am always fascinated by tech. Chandoo (00:20:08): So, I had website created couple of years before, really just as a personal project and I put all my personal life stories there. So, I thought, "Oh, maybe I should just put it on my blog and talk about this new thing that I discovered in Excel." And I put it there. Obviously, it's not a discovery. It's something that people have been doing for ages. It's just that in my own silo, I thought this was new. But when I put there, I got a random comment from somebody in a different part of the world. And that was a weird experience because up until that time, the only people who read the blog are my friends or people who I personally know. I'll tell them, "Hey, I have this blog," and they'll go and read it and they'll comment. But then, I got this comment from a strange dude all over in a different part of the world saying, "You know what, you could also do this to improve the chart." Chandoo (00:20:57): And that kind of blew me like, "Oh, there is actually a community of Excel users who are collaborating and sharing information." And I started slowly doing that over time. And one thing led to another and it kind of blew really out of proportion that at some point, I was actually doing two jobs, right? This consulting job, as well as maintaining the blog in the weekends and nights, just keeping up with the traffic, as well as sharing information, collaborating with people in the comments and email. It became too much. But I also thought, maybe I could go and launch a product here to see if this could become a business. And again, none of this was intentional. It was simply, I would write an article and people will say, "Hey, if you put a template around this, we would buy it." Chandoo (00:21:43): And then, I thought, "Oh, really? You'd pay for this? Okay. Let's just see this." So, that's how things really happen. So, this all began in 2006, but around 2009, after three years of doing that, I left my job so that I could just do this full time. And by then, I had a bunch of not really products. I had two products, main products. So, one is an online Excel class, and the other is a set of project management templates built in Excel. And that's pretty much where it kind of really went from a blog website to a business and a life thing for me. Rob Collie (00:22:20): There are some echoes of some other people's stories in that. There's a little bit of parallel for me. I started my blog after you started yours. I started mine in 2009, long before I really knew what sort of business opportunities would come out of it. I kind of knew that there was a consulting company to be created around this new stuff, but the world wasn't ready for that. I wasn't ready for that. So, the blog existed for a long time before we became a company. It sounds a little bit like Bill Jelen story. It sounds a little bit like Adam Saxton, Guy in a Cube, right? Like it's almost always this side thing. That's just like a passion thing that eventually morphs into something more. Chandoo (00:23:08): You could kind of say that the formula, but again, there are many people who might either give up halfway through the journey simply because life got in the way, or they'd never really got to a point where it could become a self-sustaining thing. And also, some other people might be so lucky as today. From day one, they vision it as a business. But for many of us in this particular group, I think it all happened almost like a series of accidents really, rather than... Looking back, you might think, "Oh, that was a genius strategy to have a blog and this and that." And there's nothing really deliberate there. Rob Collie (00:23:48): Oh, I completely agree. It's like the same thing people tell me about the books that I wrote. "Oh, it's such genius that you wrote it in that informal non-tech book tone, Rob." And I go, "Well, it turned out though," but at the time, it was just a survival strategy. I couldn't get through writing that thing in the other voice. Chandoo (00:24:09): Yeah, I wouldn't have imagine. I think that's the thing, right? It is always good to look back and try to figure out or maybe there's a picture that we draw with all these random dots on the paper. There were other dots... Rob Collie (00:24:24): Or just let other people draw it for you. It's usually more flattering, than what you would draw for yourself, looking back. One of the things that we do on this show is we compliment our guests. We almost like attempt to make you uncomfortable with praise, but it's authentic, right? We don't go out of our way to manufacture things. So, again, I've seen multiple people, almost like explicitly try to copy the Chandoo formula. They've looked in from the outside and gone, "Wow, look at that," right? And go and try to copy it. And it's easier said than done because it turns out that the person behind the Chandoo formula is a little bit unique, like your personality and creativity and humanity. Rob Collie (00:25:14): You integrate that into this technical stuff in a way that you either have that or you don't. You can coach it up in yourself to a certain extent, but to go with all the hard work, there are some innate characteristics that we all look into them or don't look into them and that creativity and that sense of fun and whimsy, it's easy to tell when someone's forcing it. If people have very, very, very good radar for that, you're just so dang quirky in a such a good way. I mean that completely, as a compliment, I call some of my best friends freak shows. It's so cool and to have gotten to know you personally, we haven't necessarily kept in the closest touch, but we definitely got to know each other personally back in the day, and that was awesome. Chandoo (00:26:13): It is awesome. Talking about that formula, you could say it's a formula, but I would say it's one of the proven ways of growing your online brand and making it into a sustainable business. And it's nothing new that I invented. I think you could say, maybe I had lucked out by starting early because around 2003, 2004, that's pretty much when the ecosystem of these blogs and in personal branding was kind of like picking up in a more rapid fashion, just because there's more people with internet, there is more... For example, back in '90s, if you have to create a website, you wouldn't really know where to begin. But 2000s was slightly different because there's software like WordPress or BlogSpot and other stuff, which makes it easy for anybody to get them and then, put their... Chandoo (00:27:03): Which makes it easy for anybody to get on and then put their story out in the front of millions of people. Of course, people may or may not read it, but it was easy for me to put it out. And I think what I did early on is I would read a lot of blogs about growing an online business and an online brand. And this was also not deliberate, it so happened that those were the guys who were loudest in the blogosphere. So if for every 10 articles that are out there, five and six of them would be about the small business or teaching stuff or selling stuff. There's a lot of that, and I would read that and I would think, "Oh, this is a good idea, maybe I should include it in what I'm doing. And this is a good idea, maybe I should do it." But there is also some things that you are gifted with, not really gifted, but those are the things that were a part of your personality even before you jumped into this business world. Chandoo (00:27:54): You either grew up as an introvert or an extrovert, you either have flair for technology or you don't, and you either have good understanding of the language or you don't, and all of those things. So that's really our personality mix. So there is a strange combination of all of these weird things that really helped me reach the audience and say things. And also, keep it fun. I look back and I think, "Oh man, I put a joke in here without even trying." I think that's because I really enjoy... That's the way I liked to say things. My kids are now quite old and they're at a point where they're getting annoyed with all the jokes that I put, but they also appreciate that Dad probably is not going to ever be serious about... I mean, I am serious, I think about everything, but it's just that he's not going to be a strict dad, he's going to be a fun dad. That's really the kind of thing that they say. Chandoo (00:28:53): So that's really me. And I think that was part of the thing. But people can go and take the formula, which is really what I did. When I launched my first online course, I had no clue what to do. So I read this article, they were already doing some online courses in a different field, and one of the suggestions they gave is, you don't have to record the whole thing to sell it. Up until that point, I was thinking I had to create this 20 hour course before I could actually go and sell it. But they said, "Maybe make one or two modules first and then go and start marketing, go and start selling, because there may not be a market for what you're offering, so go and do it." Chandoo (00:29:33): So that's really what I did. I was working in Sweden at that time, and Nishant and Nakshatra were just born, and Jo was with them in India. Because of my consulting job, I'd go to all these places. So I was in Denmark and Sweden that time. And I launched this course, I said that, "Hey, there is Excel School now, please go and sign up." and I created only one module, one or two modules. Then I sold it, and I thought maybe five or 10 will buy it, it's about 60 to $100, the course. In my mind, that was a lot of money. Even today, it is a lot of money, but I felt like at that point, that is big bucks. And I think around 100 people bought it. And that really scared the shit out of me because when you take 100 times 100, that's almost $10,000 really. Chandoo (00:30:22): And $10,000 was sitting in my PayPal account, close to that. And $10,000 is close to my salary if I'm working in India, that's my annual salary at that point in life. But because I was working in Sweden, I would get overseas payments, so it was almost $50,000, that's how much I was making at that time. But I was thinking in my Indian mindset, "I'm making all my annual salary by selling this one course, which is not even ready." So it scared me. And I thought, "Man, I need to do it right by these people. They paid for it, they bought it, I need to deliver it to them, I only made two modules." So I left my job, went back to India, finished recording the rest of it and launched the course. So that's how I learned, and that's the formula that I show in my blog and sharing my personal stories, because I want others to take these ideas as well. But I think the key thing people might miss out is putting their personality into it. Chandoo (00:31:19): If you just want to fake it all the way, then it might be hard, but if you bring yourself in your perspective and your life and your values into it, that will make it your own, and you're no longer cloning anything you're taking the best of what is working for others and mashing it up. Rob Collie (00:31:35): Now, at some point on this journey, not to narrow you in too much, you were running Excel School, it's general purpose. One of the things I think you became known for as an outlier, even within that space was the dashboarding that you would do in Excel. Now that's where we saw the Mozart in Chandoo. I mean, holy cow, people would look at the stuff that you would build in Excel, and it's gorgeous, it's just so beautiful. And everyone... Not everyone, but a lot of people that I knew, very wise, people knew that the quality of their work was going to be judged by the visual impact that their spreadsheets would have. And people would go to your site, and again, they would go to your site for many reasons, but the one that I disproportionately encountered was people saying, "Yeah, we go get the slick Excel visuals from Chandoo." And this is particularly relevant as the world is experiencing the onset of Power BI. And I know you've diversified, you're not just the Excel guy anymore. I mean, heck you did a Power Pivot class for that, in what, 2012, 2013. Rob Collie (00:33:07): I honestly haven't kept close tabs on what you've been doing with Power BI. And that is a real shame because if, and again, I haven't looked, maybe I haven't looked because I don't want to feel inadequate, but as rich of a canvas as Excel is for dashboard creation, oh my gosh, Power BI has really hit critical mass on the things you can do in their report canvas. I feel like now I need to have a Christmas morning moment where I go open up a bunch of Chandoo-approved Power BI reports and go, "Oh my God." Does it speak to you? How's that transition been? Chandoo (00:33:51): Yeah, it's been very good, but also there were a couple of things that stopped me from really going full on when the Power BI way was going up. The number one thing is, between 2015 and 2016, that's when Power BI was gaining that initial momentum, I have been blogging and talking about Power BI as well, but we also chose to move from India to New Zealand. So that was a big move, you are taking all your life that you have been rooting in one country and then now suddenly you uplift and you go to a different part of the world. It is both physically and emotionally very hard experience to go set yourself up in a different place, make new friends and start your life all over again. And also around 2015, you could say, I reached a point where, and I'm not trying to brag or anything, it's just the fact of the matter is, I reached a point where there is no financial incentive that would motivate me to do things. Chandoo (00:34:54): I am very happy with what I have in my life. I have a very good family, enough money to sustain whatever I want to do for the rest of my life, and everything was there. So there is really no carrot in front of me that will chase me to go and get it. I mean, I would only have to do it if I am enjoying this. So for me, the enjoyment started shifting slowly from running a website to other things, like maybe becoming a better cyclist or being around the kids with their life or playing with Lego or doing video games or doing other fun craft things. Because one of the challenges of being creative in any field, I guess, you can't be creative all the while if you're just doing it not for fun reasons, but for something else. I thought, "Maybe I had my day, I'm enjoying things. I don't need to push myself harder." So that's when I turned a blind eye to Power BI, not just to Power, to Excel also. And I would only blog once or twice a month, and that's pretty much it. Chandoo (00:35:57): I would still produce good quality content that I'm enjoying, but I got myself into a place where there are so many other things and balls juggling in the air that I thought, "Okay, this is enough." But after settling down in New Zealand and after things calmed down a bit, that's when I started thinking, "Okay, I need to figure out what I'm doing with my time. You're not really doing it for money or anything, but there is also, you have time." I try to rekindle that passion for data and for helping people become good in their lives. So naturally I reassessed like, "Okay, what are the things that we have available today? So there's Excel, there is obviously Power BI and then there is other tools coming in." Simultaneously, I would do some consulting work for the local government here in New Zealand. So I'd get into situations where the data or the challenges were different than the ones that I have experienced previously. So I'm learning a lot, and I thought, "Okay." Again, my go-to point when I learn something new is, put it out on the blog so other people can also learn. Chandoo (00:37:00): So I created a course on Power BI, it's called Power BI Play Date. I teach dashboards and stuff like that in there. I tried to replicate some of that Xcel crafting and that sort of dashboard mindset, which tries to tell a compelling story and provide a good narrative to the end user rather than just use things for the heck of using it within Power BI. Now, Power BI is a different platform altogether. So it has its own rules and it has its own canvas and things like that, where there are set limitations imposed by the nature of things. Like in Excel, you may have to explain 10 things, but within Power BI, because of the interactions, you don't have to explain 10 things, you have to let your audience know that there are 10 things there, but only bring the important bits out and let them figure out the rest. Chandoo (00:37:50): So I do this and I enjoy it. I run the course and I do more around Power BI these days than I do on Excel. I run corporate trainings and stuff like that as well. It is a different platform and I enjoy building stuff on Power BI. What I do find a little bit lacking though, and I think it's just still evolving, it's too early for us to go and put judgment on Power BI on this space, which is the visuals, sometimes they are not up to the mark and not everything that you want to achieve to get the correct and accurate representation of the information, are straightforward within Power BI. There's probably custom visuals AND heavy customization you could do, but one of my core principles when I build anything with any software is, that we humans should be lazy. But if I am ending up clicking 300 times to format a bar chart, then I'm like, "What the heck? This should be simple." Rob Collie (00:38:46): Yeah. It is very clicky with the formatting. Chandoo (00:38:53): Yeah. I mean, there is Format Painter, but I feel like even after all the formatting, it will not get you nowhere near as good as a visual that you could produce in R or Excel, or any other tool for that matter. This is simply because I think they went in a different direction, maybe deliberately to enable that sort of interact to things. So everything needs to interact, or hence not everything that you could do in other tools is possible. But it's a visual software, the whole output of whatever you create in Power BI. You might build an amazing model and beautiful measures, but nothing is visible until you put a visual there. So the visuals need to be the hero of that platform, but I feel like the focus has been heavily on the data and modeling side of things. You need those, I guess, but now that they're stable, I wish Microsoft would put in more effort into the visual space and try to make them right and make them easy for the audience to build and work on them. Rob Collie (00:39:53): If you're interested in providing feedback, I can certainly connect you with the people that would like to hear it. Chandoo (00:40:00): I think. Rob Collie (00:40:02): It is very difficult. So, it's funny, the job that you worked at the consulting firm, you're the business analyst, that's exactly the job I had at Microsoft, which is trying to absorb what the customers need. And what they want and what they need aren't necessarily the same thing. Try to absorb all of that and then translate it to the tech crew to implement, while at the same time trying to simplify everything. That's exactly...So you were doing that for custom line of business software projects, probably, for the consulting firm, and I was doing it for things like Excel, but it's the same job. Chandoo (00:40:34): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:40:34): And for the people at Microsoft who have this job, doing that for Power BI, it's actually really hard sometimes to see the forest for the trees. You're so down in the details, it is a gift for someone in that role to be given any sort of thoughtful, structured feedback, or thoughtful, structured advice. Like on the visual layer, I would not be one that you would want to take that kind of structured advice, it's not really my forte, different beast, the Chandoo. Rob Collie (00:41:10): Okay. I was going to make this joke, which is that you're doing it wrong. If you have that kind of perspective where you reached the tipping point where the financial incentive isn't the primary driver, in my experience, from watching a bunch of Microsoft executives anyway, that's when you need to tell yourself that it isn't enough. And you need to just pick a taller hill and go climb that, and never be complete, never be fulfilled. And there are so many people like that. I haven't reached that point in my life that you're describing. That's something I strive for. I think that I'll be more like you and less like some of the people that I saw at Microsoft, who had everything, and still wrecked themselves after having everything. And it was really sad to watch it. I think a lot of celebrities in business are driven by this perpetual insecurity, that you fortunately, you're not driven by that. Chandoo (00:42:07): Yeah. I think, again, it's not portraying myself as I have no insecurities or I don't feel inadequate in any which way, it's just that at least I am aware from time to time, and I take a point... Like if I feel anxious for some reason and feel myself like I'm running towards this or that from time to time, I try to at least pull myself back and take a stop and at least try to admire what is already there, what is available and what we have achieved. And that lets me calm down a bit. Obviously there is no value in running for itself, but you don't want to be standing still and just admire the beauty. Also, there is some amount of effort you need to put in because that will make you feel fulfilled, having some fulfillment in your day, but it need not be just the amount of money that you are generating on an ongoing basis alone. Chandoo (00:43:00): At least that's my value. They might derive satisfaction just by running and chasing more money, and that's what makes them happy, they can do it. So you remember the time when you were not there or you were there, but we all went to Chicago from Cleveland when I was in US? And Jocelyn and I, we were driving in one car. So we rented this car, and I think you were driving in another car or something. And we went to, was it Jocelyn's sister or was it- Rob Collie (00:43:26): Yeah. Chandoo (00:43:26): ... your sister? Okay. Yeah. So we were driving in the car and Jocelyn was telling me all about her life story and how she met you and all of that, how both of you met each other while working at Microsoft and some of the hard times that she had and all of that, it was a very deep talk because Chicago is not nearby. So it was like a good four or five hours drive if I remember correctly. The topic turned into money topic as well. And Jocelyn was saying about few different things and this and that. And the topic turned on me, and I remember canvasing to her that I find it really hard to spend money because I grew up in a very poor family. I mean, it's not probably the poorest family by Indian standards, but it is still poor family. And there were times when I was growing up, when we would not know exactly where our next meal would come or how we are going to pay for school fees. Chandoo (00:44:17): And there were points of time where I had to pull out of school because we couldn't afford school fees and all sorts of that. There was a lot of hardship. As a kid I never really thought of that as hardship, it was just the experience. So you're growing up, but there was a lot of uncertainty, and that makes you who you are. As I grew up and as I started making money, that insecurity that if I don't have money, then I will struggle. Not only me, but whoever is dependent on me will also struggle. So that made me an obsessive saver where I will try to save everything for tomorrow rather than be in the moment and enjoy what I have today. And even when I have big money and I have lots more to spend, I would be always like, "I don't need anything. I'm happy with what I have. I'll just put it off for tomorrow." Chandoo (00:45:07): So I was telling Jocelyn that I find it really hard to spend money with the amount of money that I make. I still try to just spend maybe 10 or 20% of what I earn and everything else is going towards the saving or investment or whatever. So you could say maybe I'm chasing that instead of chasing money, I'm trying to chase for some better tomorrow. I mean, I do realize that there is no better tomorrow, today's as good as it gets. So you need to take a moment, chill out and enjoy. But I think having that awareness is more important than just chasing. If you know why you are chasing something, then you will enjoy it. Rob Collie (00:45:42): Agreed. The other part of that story also resonated with me, which is you had a little time to recharge your batteries, pursue some other things. And then you come back around and you say, "Hey, this Power BI thing, that is a worthy thing to explore, that is a worthy development path for myself." It's almost like the opportunity to, like your favorite movie, you would love to be able to watch it again for the first time, experience it a new. Now, Power BI isn't like Excel, it's not the same thing, it's similar in some ways, but it's the closest you're ever going to get to being able to climb the Excel hill again, is to climb the Power BI hill. And in the end, you end up with this same sort of polished, interactive output, a symphony being played over some data. And for whatever reason, sickos like me and you, that speaks to us. Chandoo (00:46:43): Yeah, we enjoy it. And it is a very good challenging environment for you to learn and master and talk about it. It's a different experience altogether to do things in Power BI, because despite all it's visual, that's what the software is for. Unlike Excel, there is no area where you're building the calculations, everything is in this black box. Well, technically not a black box, you can still see the measures and all that, but a lot goes behind scenes than what is out there. So explaining that, and because I try to view everything from the explanation I write, because my job, I feel like is to do something and then also explain it. So every time I build something, I'm like, "Okay, how am I going to explain this?" Because I don't want people to be like, "Ta- da, this is showing up now." So it needs to be having that steps as well. So I try to think in that direction, and that is an interesting challenge in itself to take something like that and make it more reachable to the audience, I guess. Rob Collie (00:47:44): Just thinking about that, I think about you're going through that and doing that, you're creating videos, right? Chandoo (00:47:49): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:47:50): So I've got to thank you, you taught me Camtasia. Chandoo (00:47:55): Oh, well. Rob Collie (00:47:55): Yeah. And not just like, "Oh, here are where the buttons are," you taught a bit of the art of it. Chandoo (00:48:02): Oh, well, I really appreciate it. And I think, I feel like I have learned more Camtasia in the last year than all of my life together. This might surprise you lik, "What the heck are you talking? You are using Camtasia all the way back in 2013 as well." This is because about a year and half ago, I decided to switch from blog first to YouTube first. So now all my content is primarily produced for YouTube. And if needed, I will put a blog article, but sometimes I'll just link to an older article because there is a lot of content already. And I feel like there is no extra value in writing another article just for the sake of maintaining a YouTube video. So primarily all the content that I'm creating is for YouTube. And the YouTube presents a different challenge. If I'm creating a course, people are hooked on it, they paid for it, they logged in, they're setting time to learn, so they will watch me go through all the steps for 15 minutes to understand. Chandoo (00:48:57): But on YouTube, it's a different game altogether. The audience have many other distractions. There is also the aspect of how much time they can set aside in their day. Many times people are not really deliberately sitting down, "Okay, I'm going to have a YouTube sesh now." Instead they're doing something, and then suddenly they'll go onto YouTube to see quickly how to do certain things, or maybe they're having their tea break or lunch and they just want to watch a video. So that time span is very limited, and we want to address something valuable, provide good content and share something fun with them. So the videos need to be shorter, but they still need to be just as useful, fun and engaging. So I'm learning more on Camtasia in the last one year, like how do you combine various things, how do you add more effects, how do you present your story, how do you view this together. But yeah, it's good. Rob Collie (00:49:52): Tom's not here today, but one of his pet peeves is the cliche you hear over and over again, "There's more data created in the last year than in the entire human history before that." Well, here's another example of that, "Chandoo has learned more about Camtasia in the last year than he has in all of human history before." And when you said that you've learned more in the last year about Camtasia, my jaw did in fact drop. I'm like, "Oh my God, I need to come see this." Basically, everything I know about video editing in Camtasia, I learned from you, and in a very short period of time, so I need another bootcamp. Chandoo (00:50:29): You might have taken those and you might have gone really well past that point. Obviously that's really what happens with technology tools, the software evolves, we use it day in, day out. Then we realize, "Oh, we could do this. We could do that". Yeah, maybe watch some of my YouTube videos and let me know how that is, if you enjoy not just the video, but also the editing. Rob Collie (00:50:51): When you're watching something that's well done, you don't really notice. Chandoo (00:50:55): Yeah, obviously that's the whole point, right? Rob Collie (00:50:58): Right, the techniques. But then it was different essentially sitting at the editing console with you and you going, "Okay, so here I would probably do something like this." And then I'm like, "Oh, I would have never thought to do that. That's that's awesome." Certain pieces of software, certain tool sets are ones that I tend to evolve my skills over time on my own. I'm not really making videos these days. Maybe I'll be evolving otherwise. I would say that my Camtasia skills are basically frozen in 2013 where you taught me. Chandoo (00:51:30): Well, that's a nice compliment. And yeah, I think if you're not making videos, there's almost no value in learning the skills, because it just keeps changing and they have newer version now coming up every year. So sometimes you learn something, and the next year, boom, there's another way of doing it. And then we're like, "Why did they even bother learning this in the first place?" Rob Collie (00:51:53): The people at our company that play in our fantasy football league, and who've been subjected to my fantasy football gloating videos, they owe the production quality of those to you. I can't credit you for the singing quality, the vocals in those videos are terrible. And there's nothing you could do, even Chandoo couldn't correct my singing. And no, those videos are not available for public consumption. We are not going to- Chandoo (00:52:19): Maybe you should probably- Rob Collie (00:52:19): ... unlisted for a reason Chandoo (00:52:20): ... do that as the next episode of Raw Data, we're all singing. Rob Collie (00:52:25): On the previous episode, we talked about rewriting an AC/DC song, Dirty Reads Done Dirt Cheap. AC/DC really lends itself to alternate vocals. It wouldn't be the first time I've rewritten an AC/DC song, but then someone's got to get on the mic, things get ugly. Well, I'm one of those artists, when I write the alternate lyrics, I can't let someone else sing it for me. I've got to go do it myself, and again, it's sad. It's kind of neat. I mean, on one hand you could say that you were early to the internet. I'm going to use the word celebrity because I don't think really, any other word is better, and celebrity is not the perfect word, but one of the early adopters, one of the first movers in that space. Of course at the same time, that's years later than Bill Jelen. Chandoo (00:53:13): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:53:14): Which is crazy, right? I mean, it's like... Chandoo (00:53:17): I mean, imagine how much vision or... I don't want to say random and [inaudible 00:53:23] all his effort. It's completely his vision to have that started and even have a publishing company and all of that empire built. Rob Collie (00:53:32): Amazing, yeah. And as you say, he's been on the show and he has, absolutely it was not deliberate, it was still not a called shot. Chandoo (00:53:42): Yeah, but even if it's not deliberate, I think the biggest quality with some of these people like Bill, they have is, they listen, they see what's happening, they get the feedback, they tap into their emotions, they take a deliberate action from time to time. He could have started MrExcel forum and left it there, but he realized, "Okay, people are getting help from this. I need to... Chandoo (00:54:03): And left it there. But he realized, okay, people are getting help from this, I need to work on this, improve it better for them and people are buying these over priced Excel books that are sometimes way too detailed or way too complicated. I need to change the market. So, those are deliberate actions. You couldn't say one day he woke up and suddenly found a printing press in his house or anything. Rob Collie (00:54:21): Yeah. Agreed. So, what has it been like, having been early to the Excel internet celebrity phenomenon, but then joining the Power BI game... Not late, but very much in progress. Just like me, when I was first blogging about Power Pivot, I basically didn't have competition. I was the only weirdo obsessed with this stuff and writing about it like violently almost. I couldn't help myself. Whereas if I started that today, I would be joining a field that is very crowded by comparison. How has that been different? And I know that it's a different point in your life. So of course, it's going to be different anyway, but what have you noticed that's different about those two different journeys? Chandoo (00:55:10): I didn't really notice any difference, this is because the audience that I have been cultivating over time, they have also gone to a point in life where they are naturally migrating to Power BI and they already trust me, they know me, they have joined the courses or they have learned from me previously. So for them, it's easy to relate to the content that I produce because, it's like same teacher is teaching you 101 and then 102 class kind of thing. So, it's easy for them to relate. So, I had the ready audience either by luck or by that... Rob Collie (00:55:47): Cultivation. Chandoo (00:55:48): Yeah. So, it wasn't really like a fresh start. Like I would go and put, learnpowerbi.com as a website and put there. I'm already putting it on my website, so it's easy for people to connect the dots. But what I did notice is that audience, especially because Power BI is like an evolving platform and people have been using it way before even I started writing or we making videos about it, some of the people have already shifted away to those channels or those platforms to learn more. So, they are kind of tuning me out for Power BI because they're thinking Chandoo will teach us Excel, these other people will teach me about Power BI. So, the engagement or the feedback that I would get on Power BI related stuff is significantly lower than the Excel stuff that I would produce. So, I could clearly see that happening both on the YouTube channel as well as on my website. This is the reason why I got into self-doubt at some point thinking, should I even bother making a course about it, because it's a big investment of time on my side. Chandoo (00:56:55): And if I'm not benefiting a lot of people, then it would be just a futile exercise of me recording videos, producing everything, marketing it, and just simply annoying people if they're not ready to buy or whatever. But then when I launched the course, to my surprise, people were willing to pay and join. And that was the good, positive feedback for me. So, I went and I did that a few more times. So, it is good experience for me. All in all, I'd say it's a very positive experience. Last month on my YouTube channel, what I've been doing is, last Friday of every month, I do a live stream. So, Power BI is one of the most requested topics for live stream and the live stream that I did on Power BI, which was in June, was a massive success. Like we had quite a few people show up and go through the thing. And even on replay... This is a live stream, right? We are talking. There is lots of valuable content, but there is also a lot of content. I'm not going to call it. Rob Collie (00:57:52): There's valuable content and then there's content. Chandoo (00:57:55): So, there's a lot of stuff where I would just randomly read comments and flash them on the screen to say what people are asking or muse about things and all of that. And even on replays, people are watching all of that. So, this is good indicator that now there is more. And every time I ask a question on my community like, "What do you want to see next?" Power BI was the highest asked item. So, there's more people asking for that and I believe this is simply because people explain, they like my style, define me to be their teacher. So, they want me to teach it. And I think that is a good indicator for me. I will be creating more Power BI focused videos in the rest of this year and get more into Power BI. Not to say I'll ditch Excel. I'll keep using Excel because, Excel has continued to be the big platform that is used by millions of people all over the world. And I would love to be of help to them. Rob Collie (00:58:49): I think Excel is also experiencing a sort of Renaissance. Chandoo (00:58:53): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:58:54): The re-imagining what all it is that can happen in Excel. Some of the fundamentals of Excel are not being changed. They're being expanded in ways that we really haven't seen, maybe ever. There's a lot of fresh opportunity, a lot of fresh topics to talk about in Excel. A lot of things to dive into. Chandoo (00:59:14): Exactly. Especially the way they are expanding the formal language into more dynamic world and probably the terrible name, but the Lambda functions and all of that. Rob Collie (00:59:27): On the podcast with Brian Jones of Excel, I told him multiple times, "You're going to rename this at some point. You're going to rename it." Chandoo (00:59:38): The moment you see Lambda, you'll be like, "This is like another bot text." Nobody's going to even type that into Excel. Like, "What is Lambda?" Rob Collie (00:59:49): Yeah. I told him my favorite thing about the Lambda functions is that you hear the name and you immediately know what they do. Chandoo (00:59:56): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:59:58): So, are you getting into Lambda functions? Chandoo (01:00:00): I don't want to use the beta version. This is just by choice. I don't have access to Lambda function yet. I'm itching to play. I could just enable it with a click. I know that, but I don't want to make them. Simply because I don't want to ruin my Excel by changing the user experience from time to time. And I don't have to compete with them. I couldn't be really bothered to do that. But I know what they're capable of. I watch other people do it on YouTube and I did help play with them on my personal laptop the other day. It is a very good addition. I feel like this is not to again, go and say negative things about the amazing work this Excel team is doing. There is a lot of energy put into the more abstract way of doing things. I would say Lambda and Map and Reduce are at a very high level. Chandoo (01:00:46): And even I have done a lot of programming and I believe you may have already done some programming too. Even for us, it would be a hard concept to understand such a very generic version of things. And then actually capitalize on that raw power that you are getting now. But what would really help end users is, at least the way I hear when I talk to people or trying them is, some of the more things that should be done readily. Just to give one simple example, the other day I was training some people in Australia and they were asking, "How do I remove the spaces within the text?" So you have two words, but there's some extra spaces in the middle. And then I said, "Oh, you could use trim." And then they're like, "Trim? What is that?" Because when you hear the word trim, unless you have a very good background in the language or the history of computers, you wouldn't really guess that- Rob Collie (01:01:39): Right. Chandoo (01:01:39): ... this is the one that removes spaces. And then she immediately said, "Why doesn't it say remove spaces?" Rob Collie (01:01:46): Yeah. Chandoo (01:01:46): This is the usability that I'm talking about. We could add more synonym functions or if you go on internet and search, one of the common things that people ask with VLOOKUP is, "How do I VLOOKUP the second value or how do I get to everything with VLOOKUP?" And Excel still doesn't have a function. And they say, "Oh, you can use filter", or you can use this or that, but why not take the VLOOKUP and make, when now there is XLOOKUP also, but they had the opportunity to take the XLOOKUP and also make it more like XLOOKUP filter. So, I feel like some of that energy also needs to go into these mainstream things. Might sound like ranting here. But... Rob Collie (01:02:26): No. This is important. I share these beliefs. I think you're a bit more sophisticated in your beliefs all along these lines, where I'm a bit more intuitive, emotional about them. You can refine them to very specific points very quickly and effortlessly. I'm going to ask you a wild question out of the blue. If Microsoft came to you one day and offered you a job, let's ignore the money for a moment. How much they were paying you, whatever and you didn't have to move. Would you accept job on the Microsoft product teams? Chandoo (01:02:58): I might accept. In fact, this is not something that I told many people, but a while ago I did actually put my hand up for a job, because I saw one in the MVP group, we get some emails from product managers. The email content was, they're looking for a person who is at the intersection of Excel, Power BI and the data visualization. I said, "Yeah. I'm not really looking for a job or anything. I don't really have the energy to do a full-time job. But if you are happy to take somebody remote and if you're willing to take someone part-time for a couple of days a week, I might be willing to do this, because I believe I can contribute in this space." But I think they were actually looking for a specific role within a specific city in US. So, it didn't happen. Chandoo (01:03:45): I also questioned like, it's easy for an outsider to make noise and complain and bitch about things. But when you are there, you will then suddenly come across these 75 constraints on every little thing that I want to do and there's a lot of internal drama and politics and whatnot goes on in these organizations, right? So, there might be genuinely people trying hard, but get just pushed aside, because there're other priorities or paying customers are asking you to do this or that. So, I wouldn't really know for sure. Rob Collie (01:04:16): Well, I do. I've had that job and you are correct that very often, some of the things that seem very frustrating on the outside. Why the hell? But on the inside, there's a really good reason. Chandoo (01:04:31): Yeah. Rob Collie (01:04:31): It wouldn't even help the world to hear it really. It's too mundane, it's really boring. So, you're never going to hear that reason on the outside. But the thing is, it's also that clarity is very hard to come by. When you're in that job, almost by definitio

Bill Jelen, known to many as Mr. Excel, was one of the first Internet Tech Celebrities. He turned his online resume into a highly recognizable brand and is a legend in the data community. We get his story, in his own words.  We hope you'll enjoy this candid conversation with Mr. Excel, Bill Jelen   Buy Bill's book Mr.Excel 2021: Unmasking Excel, containing his favorite Excel tips!   Stuff We Mentioned: Hipster Ipsum Copy Filler Tool Dax Studio We Report Space-Bill's Other Website! Rob's Wheel Of Inquisition   Episode Timeline: 3:15 - Mr. Excel's Origin Story 18:05 - The Excel vs Power BI user base 35:35 - Dax is Badass! 47:25 - Lambda Functions in Excel, Mr. Excel asks some Python questions, and Rob gets cynical 1:16:50 - Bill's other passion We Report Space and the story of Tickling Keys 1:28:30 - More on Lambda functions and Let functions and the immense potential there

In this episode Bill Jelen (Mr. Excel) joins Mary Schaeffer for an episode that is both entertaining and educational. Jelen includes many behind-the-scenes anecdotes related to the creation of certain Excel features. The begins with a humorous tale of how Bill got started on the road to becoming Mr. Excel. It started when his boss bought an expensive piece of reporting software (for $100,000) that didn’t work. And, so Bill downloaded the information from the ERP system using the expensive software and then did all the analytical work in Excel. He also regales the audience with tales of the annual meeting Microsoft has with a group of authors, like himself. He shares that while the authors enjoy the meeting, the programmers – not so much. He then launches into the meat of the podcast, demonstrating to the audience how they can use three often overlooked features in Excel, specifically, Filter by Selection, Get & Transform Data, and the New TextJoin or Concat Functions features. The features are explained using accounting and accounts payable examples and are easily understandable. There is something for both the Excel novice and the Excel expert. This is one episode you will probably want to listen to more than one time. Host: Mary Schaeffer (www.ap-now.com) Guest: Bill Jelen (https://www.mrexcel.com/) Sponsor: Stampli (www.stampli.com/APNow) Credit: Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

Microsoft recently released some new Excel features in their Office 365 subscription license. What better way to talk about these new Excel features than with Bill Jelen from MrExcel.com who has published more than 50 books about Microsoft Excel! In this Excel podcast we talk about: The difference between Office 365 subscription and Excel 2019 download version; The different Office 365 subscription options; The new Excel features released in Office 365 Geography & Stock Data Type Artificial Intelligence with Ideas Dynamic Arrays: SORT, SORTBY, FILTER, UNIQUE & RANDARRAY

Our special encore guest today is Bill Jelen and he is the host of MrExcel.com and the author of 54 books about Microsoft Excel including “Excel Gurus Gone Wild”, “Pivot Table Data Crunching”, “Power Pivot Alchemy” and “MrExcel Live”. Before founding MrExcel.com in 1998, Jelen spent 12-years “in the trenches”, as a financial analyst for the accounting, finance, marketing, and operations departments of a publicly held company. Since then, his company automates Excel reports for hundreds of clients around the world. The website answers over 30,000 questions a year for free for readers all over the world. You may remember Bill and the wisdom he shared during Episode 131. If you haven’t listened to, studied, and applied all he shared during our first interview...I highly encourage you to add Episode 131 to your list of vital priorities. What you’ll learn about in this episode: How to stay focused on your goals by avoiding distractions The benefits of tackling your most important tasks first The value of taking cornerstone content and repurposing it for other platforms Using keywords within YouTube to bring people to your site How you can build your business by being an expert in a particular field How answering questions on Quora.com can benefit your business The differences between having your book self-published or using a publisher How being genuine in your efforts to help people rather than sell can lead to a successful business The benefits of a book distributor when self-publishing a book The importance of loving and having fun with what you are doing Ways to contact Bill: Website: www.mrexcel.com YouTube: Bill Jelen Twitter: @MrExcel

Bill Jelen is the host of MrExcel.com and the author of 49 books about Microsoft Excel including “Excel Gurus Gone Wild”, “Pivot Table Data Crunching”, and “Power Pivot Alchemy”. He has made over 80 guest appearances on TVs “Call for Help with Leo Laporte” and was voted guest of the year on the Computer America radio show. He writes the Excel column for Strategic Finance magazine and has produced over 1,900 episodes of his daily video podcast “Learn Excel from MrExcel.” Before founding MrExcel.com in 1998, Jelen spent twelve years "in the trenches", as a financial analyst for the accounting, finance, marketing, and operations departments of a publicly held company. Since then, his company automates Excel reports for hundreds of clients around the world. The website answers over 30,000 questions a year for free for readers all over the world. Secret – timesaving technique Bill gets his one or two most vital priorities before he ever opens his email -- email is a huge time-waster. ONWARD! Daily habit that contributes to success Write a book in pieces -- Bill writes a book in 120 pieces so that he can write a book in just four months. Could have ruined your business – but now – an invaluable learning experience Bill had to go broke printing extra copies of his fast-selling books -- and Bill tells the whole story here. Most critical skill you think business owners need to master to be successful "You need a $20 item." Most influential lesson learned from a mentor "You have to simplify."   Final Round – “Breaking Down the Recipe for Success”   What systems would you go back and put into place sooner? I wish I had realized that I didn't need to convert everyone into a customer -- you just need 1 out of every 100 or 1000. What one strategy or “recipe” would compound into big wins for business owners? Build content that answers someone's problem -- it's the beacon that allows them to find you. How to exceed expectations and add the most value? An individual would be passionate -- they need to create a following for themselves. What strategy would you recommend new business owners focus on to best ensure success? Don't be afraid to conduct an informal survey -- your customers know what they want -- listen to them How best to connect with Bill: Website: www.mrexcel.com/   You can also find us here: ----- OnwardNation.com -----

Bill Jelen aka "Mr. Excel" is an Excel MVP and one of the biggest names associated with Microsoft Excel. He is the author of 40 books about Microsoft Excel, Power Pivot and Power View. Bill has produced over 1900 Excel episodes of his daily video Podcast and has one of the most popular Excel websites and forums called MrExcel.com In this podcast we talk about how he became to be an Excel expert, his first days as Mr. Excel, the evolution of Microsoft Excel, the weirdest thing he has seen done with Excel, stories about his Power Excel Seminars, his new XL book, his favourite tips & shortcuts and much much more....

Hi there and welcome to episode 11 of the Promedia Podcast. If you would like to use any of the songs featured on my Podcasts please let me know don’t forget you can drop me an email and I can provide you with a higher quality version if required georgewood1966@hotmail.com Something a bit different for this week, it’s the “all jingle show”. Each one of these tracks was composed or submitted to be used as a jingle for another Podcast, if you’re a big Podcast fan you may have heard some of them already. The first three were create for the Excel Guru himself Bill Jelen, the first song was inspired by duelling banjos with Bill battling it out with fellow podcaster to see who has the best solution to your Excel problems. I don’t know a lot about programming banjo but I was really pleased with the results. Track two again was for Bill; he wanted a jingle for his Where is it Wednesday Podcast; I decided to keep it simple and catchy (all the best jingles are) and ripped off High School Musical, if you’re going to steal do it from the best I say. The next two and also for Bill, Bill had very clear ideas about what he wanted for this jingle, if you guessed in the style of ‘Born to run’ you were spot on. Onto the Giz Wiz Letters jingles, the first one was a special holiday version with mandatory jingle bells and lush strings, the next one was the original and still sometimes used on Leo’s show, I am really pleased these jingles caught on and have been themselves copied; the Daily Giz Wiz is an excellent Pocast and deserves all the support it gets. The last two songs I didn’t compose, they are cover version of Game Spots Hot Spot theme ( called Too hot); I sent it to the guys but never got a reply; the second is my take on the Giant Bombcast theme; again I sent it to the guys but never got a reply, I guess they were either too busy, never got it, or thought it was shit! So there you have the Promedia Jingle Show; please send feedback good or bad as long as it’s constructive, until next time…