My Excel User Conference Experience

September 26, 2008 – 11:56 am by JP

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    As you might have read in my post Excel User Conference Update, I attended the Thursday session of the Excel User Conference. Due to work constraints (which I will discuss below), I was only able to attend one day of the conference. I return home exhausted, more learned than I expected, with a new appreciation of my own knowledge and others’ experiences with Excel. I’m still exhausted but I’ll do my best here to impart my experience as coherent as possible. There’s no VBA code in this post, if you were looking for that you might want to keep moving. I will have some code posted in a few days, after I catch up on my sleep debt.

    I arrived in Atlantic City around 11:30 pm on Wednesday and crashed in the hotel room. The Taj Mahal was an excellent venue choice. The room was pretty big (king size bed!) and I tried to get some work done before getting to bed. Lately I’ve been writing some beginner VB .NET programs, using the free Express Edition available for download, and a list of code samples I found while browsing.

    But unfortunately it was late and I was tired from the road, so after a short while I just crashed. Driving for long periods really takes a lot out of you; there’s gotta be a name for it (”road hypnosis” ??). I got up around 7 and went down to the conference area at 8:00 am.

    First I met Damon Longworth who is the conference organizer and also a Microsoft MVP for Excel. Very nice guy and we chatted a bit before some others arrived. I also met Bob Umlas and Jon Peltier at that time; again, two very nice guys. Bob has a very good sense of humor, and Jon has a deep understanding of Excel, both of which were demonstrated throughout the day. Everybody looks exactly like their picture so it’s easy to spot the more well-known attendees.

    First up was Jon Peltier showing some charting integration with Excel and PowerPoint. He demonstrated various ways to paste charts into PP slides. There was also some VBA automation of PowerPoint to manipulate slide and chart objects. His computer was a bit slow, but I think it was because of the point he was demonstrating: when you paste in a chart as a workbook object, the entire workbook gets pasted into the slide (including potentially sensitive or proprietary worksheet data). Jon used Excel 2003 for his talk. As soon as I get a chance I want to look at the code samples.

    After that was Bob Umlas, another Excel MVP, who made it obvious very quickly that he knew what he was doing. He moved very quickly from basic to advanced array formulas and gave some extremely useful examples. He used Excel 2007 which he navigated pretty easily. He was the only one to use 2007. Most of the other commenters briefly mentioned their experience with 2007, which wasn’t very positive.

    Bob had some copies of his book for sale, which he autographed for some people. After he was done, I bought the 2003 version of This isn’t Excel, it’s Magic! and I’ll sneak some reading time in between my coursework and the VB .NET stuff.

    The weather sucked (cloudy and then light rain) but it didn’t matter since I didn’t spend much time outside anyway. Anyway, you don’t go to AC to go outside.

    After lunch, Bernard Liengme, another “Microsoft Excel” MVP (inside joke: Bernard mentioned that in his books he has to write it as “Microsoft Excel”, not “Excel”, per agreement w/ MS), made his presentation about using Solver. I had no idea that Solver was written by a third party, but after hearing about it, it sounds totally believeable. Other stuff like the spell checker, etc were written by third parties and just grafted onto Excel.

    I wasn’t expecting to learn much from this class, but Bernard made it interesting and showed how to apply Solver to real world problems. And he gave some crucial tips for making Solver work correctly (you’ll have to ask him!). Having never used Solver before, I feel like I could actually use it now (at least on some rudimentary optimization problems to start).

    The spreadsheets he used in his presentation were very well designed and I will make a point of completely comping his worksheet design style when doing any presentations of my own in the future.

    Last was Damon Longworth, who presented information about Pivot Tables. His presentation made me realize I know more about PTs than I thought. He demonstrated how to extract data from other sources such as a MS Access database. There was a lot of Q&A about PTs, and most of the other attendees had built them programmatically. Damon reminded us that using the same pivot cache for multiple tables is more memory and space efficient. He also showed us how to stop Excel from referencing PT data using the GETPIVOTDATA formula, by using the toggle button on the PT toolbar. Like Jon’s presentation showed, this could also be a leak to allow others to view your source data.

    Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet everyone who attended, due to the structure of the sessions, which ran concurrently. If anyone reading this attended the Thursday sessions above, please let me know. Meeting Jon and Bob and the other MVPs was a great experience, as well as the other attendees, who had varying levels of expertise and even offered some help to the presenters. By my count, there were about 30-40 people there, which surprised me, considering how many people actually need the training offered, and Atlantic City being an ideal location for having a professional conference (second only to my hometown IMO).

    The last class ended around 4:30 and I packed up and left around 5 pm.

    A synopsis of my experience at the Excel User Conference (which, by the way, is still going on today) follows. In no particular order:

• Driving three hours straight is more fun with satellite radio (no commercials)
• The spreadsheets I use in my presentations are atrociously designed
• Bob does good card tricks
• Rest-stop Burger King at 11 pm sucks
• Gas prices in New Jersey, while somewhat lower, are still high
• MS MVPs are very approachable, normal people
• Time flies when you are learning and interacting with other professionals

    As I alluded on Simon Murphy’s blog, my company decided not to pay for my training. I want to stress to anyone out there reading this, if you have an opportunity to attend a user conference, meet MVPs, whatever, even at your own expense, DO IT. There is simply no substitute for training from real-world experts.

[Update 9-28-08]: Jon Peltier posted some photos from the conference. Check it out in his Excel User Conference Recap

–JP

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Filed Under: Excel
Tags: Excel User Conference

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