Awhile back I said that if you wanted to review the book but didn’t have a place to publish it, you could send it to me and I’d publish it here.
Siraj Samsudeen is the first person to take me up on that. I really like his story – an independent consultant in Switzerland, the banking center of the universe and home to the World Bank, but he’s also lived and worked in Dubai and India. By contract, I’ve only worked in two different states, heh heh.
So yeah, he’s just your average globetrotting Excel Pro consulting to (likely super-secretive and powerful) banking organizations in Geneva. You know, the usual. 
Oh, and he’s already convinced me that I chose a bad title for the book. Lesson learned
Take it away Siraj…
Impressive Insights Hiding Under an Unappealing Title
Last week, I bought Rob Collie’s DAX formulas for PowerPivot after a bit of hesitation. Just then, I had finished reading ‘PowerPivot for the Data Analyst’ by Bill Jelen and wanted to pick up a book that would help me to take my understanding of PowerPivot to the next level. I have come across Rob’s blog a few times before and I liked what I saw there, but the title sounded like a book that just lists all the formulae in DAX and talk about when to use what – something like a book for techies who need an extensive formula reference. But it was the review of the book by Dan English that made me take the plunge.
Boy! What a surprise I was in for.
The content was fantastic. If reading Bill’s book is like taking the tour of the PowerPivot village by car, then reading Rob’s book was like getting on an airplane; the journey was fast, exciting and I got a pretty good view from the top – it is like having a very talented pilot taking you around on a short journey to show you the best vantage points; so many insights delivered in such a short book in a crisp and interesting style.
When I read in Dan English’s review that he could not put the book down, I did not really understand what he meant until I bought the book and started reading. Rob has a bold and flamboyant writing style which keeps you hooked. This is the exactly the book that I was looking for – insights on using PowerPivot delivered in a fast manner. I wish that the book was given a title like ‘PowerPivot Insights’ or ‘Thinking in PowerPivot’ – that would have conveyed the content of the book more readily. But hey, that is water under the bridge now; So, let us move on :).
The book gives you best practices for using PowerPivot based on Rob’s long experience. If I can use a movie analogy to talk about the contents of the book, I would say that the book is organised very nicely with a trailer (chapter 1), first part of the show (chapters 2-10), an intermission (chapter 11), a second part (chapter 12-20) and a trailer for the next movie (chapter 21).
Chapter 1 and Chapter 21 are very well written sales pitches. Rob clearly believes that PowerPivot is going to change the world and the cloud is the way to go for delivering reports – he tries to convince us of these 2 points in these 2 chapters. I agree with lot of what he is saying: the game field is definitely changing and organisations are tired of the long and drawn-out development cycles with traditional BI tools despite the many promises of BI vendors.
First part of the show (chapters 2-10) starts right from loading data into PowerPivot and covers the most important functionality that you need to be aware of. In the second part of the show (chapters 12-20), he gets into more nitty-gritties of using PowerPivot. Rob advises us that we can skip the entire second part and still live a very productive life with PowerPivot. But for me, the most interesting takeaway from the book came right in the beginning of the second part – the concept of disconnected tables to do scenario analysis using PowerPivot. I can hear you asking – what? Scenario analysis using pivot tables? Yes, Even I had the same incredulity when I saw the first example. I would pay the entire price of the book for this one chapter alone (Rob, I hope you won’t send me a Paypal payment request asking me to pay for the rest of the contents :).
There is something about the writing style of Rob that I really liked. Honestly, I had a few important things to finish, but I found myself postponing them just to finish this book. It is so well-written. It is very rare for a technical book to be such a page-turner. On literally every page of the book, you will find screenshots with annotations or pictures that make clear what the text of the book is conveying.
Also, Rob has infused the book with so much humour that you will keep laughing as you go through the book – Here are 3 snippets from the book:
1. Page 200 (the text under an error message dialog box): It does not like Green Eggs and Ham – not in a box, not with a fox. OK and it also doesn’t like AvgTemp as a Sort By Column.
2. Page 202 – Let’s say you wanted to create a Total Sales column in your Products table, reflecting the sales for each Product.
First, Rob would scold you. That’s what measures are for! Why would you summarize a value in your Lookup table? But then I would calm down and admit that there are definitely cases where you might occasionally need to do this
3. Page 205 (he is explaining the concept of clearing the filters and this question comes to my mind and I see it in the book) ” – “OK then, why is the inside ALL() still there?” – you always ask the smartest questions!
Rob has given a number of best practices in the form of rules based on his experience – these are very interesting and very valuable. He made the rules even more memorable by stepping through the examples in the book and checking them against the rules so you see how they operate – very clever indeed! I think that this book is unique in its coverage of PowerPivot. This is only the 2nd book that I am reading on PowerPivot – I plan to read 3 more on this topic soon. I will come back and write whether my guess is correct regarding the unique position of this book.
Congrats Rob for such a home run on your first match. I think that you have a very long illustrious career ahead as a writer! I look forward to visiting your blog regularly and to read your other books.