The Book of Doodle

Abstract: Pivot on This! Excel 2010 x64 Edition and PowerPivot Revolutionize Utilities

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How Excel 2010 x64 Can Help an Electric Utility Truly Measure Success

Within the walls of the rural electric utility, many situations arise where the need to quickly and accurately depict the current state of the electric grid.  Much like their bigger cousins in urban centers, these data are vital to being able to assess problems, protect safety, plan for the future and understand past performance.  However, unlike the large metropolitan utilities, rural utilities and cooperatives often find themselves awash with data and no way to analyze it.  This problem is most often caused by the three main problems facing utilities, as I’ve articulated before:

  1. Vendor Lockin
  2. Data Silos
  3. Poor IT Investment

As the modern IT infrastructure is finally being realized within the rural electric utility, one product in particular stands out among the rest as a powerful yet easy to use tool for understanding and analyzing these data:  Microsoft Office Excel 2010 x64.  Every utility engineer in the country knows how to use Excel.  However, most engineers, and almost all of their software vendors, do not see Excel as the most powerful business intelligence and modeling tool they could ever put their hands on.  By leveraging the mountains of data that are collected every second of the day on all utilities in the field, whether through SCADA or manual metering reads, engineers have tried, and mostly succeeded, in crafting well intentioned work plans, upgrade schedules and more.  However, until Excel 2010 x64, the engineers and meter shops haven’t had a truly robust and complete tool to literally consume all relevant utility data and turn that data into actionable intelligence.  Excel 2010 x64 edition has both the capacity and speed to pivot on literally millons of rows of data points in near real time, providing fantastic dash boarding and reporting solutions at a fraction of the cost of traditional modeling and support programs in the industry.

The abstract you see above is one of three white papers I am currently working on.  The white papers will be published here, and possibly elsewhere, in the coming weeks.  I hope you find them useful and interesting!