Microsoft recently released a free Excel 2010 add-in which uses PowerPivot to analyze your schedule from your Outlook calendar. The add in, named Calendar Analytics Tool, has two main benefits. The first is that it is extremely useful (and cool). By using the familiar Excel pivot table functionality, including Slicers, you have the ability to graphically display all of the meetings for a given period of time by: meeting topic, who was involved, categories and the details behind the high level statistics. You now have evidence that the meeting about the upcoming meeting and the following debriefing meeting is taking up too much of your valuable time.
The second, and possibly more valuable benefit, is you now have a practical application to promote self-service BI and PowerPivot within your organization. Everyone understands the concepts around meetings and time; this exercise could be a real eye opener to how one makes use of their schedule and time. It does not take a power user or super analyst to use this tool and understand its benefits. Rather, this will help to make the everyday user start to think about what else could be possible through self-service BI and analytics at the speed of thought.
The second, and possibly more valuable benefit, is you now have a practical application to promote self-service BI and PowerPivot within your organization. Everyone understands the concepts around meetings and time; this exercise could be a real eye opener to how one makes use of their schedule and time. It does not take a power user or super analyst to use this tool and understand its benefits. Rather, this will help to make the everyday user start to think about what else could be possible through self-service BI and analytics at the speed of thought.
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