Welcome to 2016!

Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. I was away from blogging, twitter and the Mr Excel forums for awhile… busy with too much stuff (both professional and personal). The good news is that is all behind us, and it is time to get crazy once again!

Let’s see what we have missed lately…

Books!

Rob and Avi have released a 2nd edition of their top selling book, and it has an amazing long title “Power Pivot and Power BI: The Excel User’s Guide to DAX, Power Query, Power BI & Power Pivot in Excel 2010-2016”. Woah! I don’t just say this as the technical editor, but the book is great… and it’s even in full color! Just buy it: http://amzn.to/1UPz40g

Matt Allington and I come from different places and paths, but both of us built our DAX chops the same way. Grabbing up all the knowledge we can from Rob, answering forums questions, and building experience helping dozens and dozens of people solve problems and gain insights. I look forward to reading his book (Learn to Write DAX: A practical guide to learning Power Pivot for Excel and Power BI), and so should you: http://amzn.to/1KdGtkw

Ken Puls and Miguel Escobar have written a great Power Query book — M Is for (Data) Monkey: A Guide to the M Language in Excel Power Query. Ken handed me a signed copy in Redmond, and I ripped through it in 2 days. It is very “step by step”, so if you learn by examples and following examples you are gonna love it: http://amzn.to/1KdGuVC

I have never met Teo Lachev, I should work on that. But I know he is well respected, isn’t a first time author, and has been awarded MVP for 12 years in a row. And hell, on Amazon, Marco Russo gives it a 5 star review? Good enough for me, good enough for you: http://amzn.to/1UPzzYj

Microsoft Data Insights Summit

Where are you going to be March 22-23? I am going to be at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit!
Mostly because I hope to end up drinking beers with keynote speaker Nate Silver of the fantastic website FiveThirtyEight. I hear Alberto Ferrari will be there too, filling out my ration of Italians!
http://www.datainsightssummit.com

Power BI

Dudes. I dunno. I’m sure stuff happened, I have given up trying to keep track. That team is nuts.

Go review http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/ and https://app.powerbi.com/visuals/ and generally be amazed and move on with your life. Ain’t nobody have time to keep track of all the awesome they are pouring forth.  I have been building dashboards and enjoying the product… but I am gonna need to go back and see what I missed at some point…

What’s Coming Up?

• I have at least 3 posts from last year that were written with the intention of a “part two”.  And… uh, I sorta didn’t do them.  I should fix that.
• I need to finally release the source code for bulk import of measures.
• I would like to start making some videos on just… “Intro to Power BI”.  Just simple stuff to help people get started and see the quick value — and maybe I will say some funny stuff!
• I know there is a post over on powerpivotpro that I need to refute… and start a sweet war.  I hear that drama is good for building an audience 🙂