Podcasts about mrexcel

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...

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/

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

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....

In this episode: News: Agendas are up for InDesign Conference and Photoshop Conference Anne-Marie's new InDesign CC 2015 to EPUB video course InDesign Magazine new issues Exporting to HTML 5: New script! Interview with Bill Jelen (he's MrExcel.com) Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Include Inside Edges  News and special offers from our sponsors: >> The Photoshop Conference, aka "The Photoshop Conference for the rest of us," is making its debut in November 16–18 in beautiful Denver, Colorado! Come and rub elbows with other designers, publishers, and production artists who want to learn from Photoshop pros like Deke McClelland, Lesa Snider, and Colin Smith.  Optional: Register for an All-Access pass so you go back and forth between this conference and The InDesign Conference, happening on the other side of the hall!  InDesignSecrets paid subscribers get $75 off registration using the code found in your Member Benefits (click "My Account" button at the top of the page).   Links mentioned in this podcast: Our InDesign Conference is in Denver, CO; Nov. 16–18, 2015 And our debut Photoshop Conference is co-located there/then Anne-Marie' new video course, InDesign CC 2015: EPUB Fundamentals Five Shortcuts Every InDesign User Should Know August 2015 InDesign Magazine issue is about "getting HTML5 out of InDesign" Keith Gilbert's post and amazing script revealing a secret back door for HTML5 export Bill Jelen, @MrExcel is the brainiac behind the Mr. Excel web site He lays out all his Mr. Excel books in InDesign — check them out! Bill's latest book, The 40 Greatest Excel Tips of All Time, should be out soon Fun tip from his book: Try this function in Excel: =ROMAN(40) Hey we know a little about Excel too … Easier importing of complex Excel spreadsheets Drag and drop to Excel David's Joy of Pi book and web site Here's the bagel with its inside edges being included in the text wrap!    

Giving away your products for free can be a great online marketing strategy. Listen to learn how Mr. Excel's "freemiums" have helped grow his e-commerce business online!