14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is offering Excel power users the chance to win no less than $2,500 by demonstrating their skills involving a new solution released by the company dubbed PowerPivot. The software giant is essentially challenging customers leveraging Excel in order to get insights into their business operations to put their skills to the test. In this regard, the Alpha Geek Challenge with Donald Farmer is focused on awarding participants for use of Microsoft technologies, and PowerPivot in particular, for BI needs.
“The PowerPivot Team wants to see what you're made of! Over the next few weeks, Donald Farmer will be issuing Business Intelligence challenges for you to solve using the new add-on PowerPivot for Excel. Three finalists will receive a $250 Microsoft Store shopping spree, and one lucky Grand Prize winner will receive an all-expenses paid trip to the 2010 Microsoft BI Conference in New Orleans, LA from June 7-10th,” reads the introductory message from Microsoft for the PowerPivot Alpha Geek Challenge.
The all-expenses paid trip to the 2010 Microsoft BI Conference in New Orleans that Microsoft is talking about is in fact the grab prize, worth an estimated $2,500. The downside of this competition is that it’s only opened to residents of the United States. According to the software giant, the judging criteria are as follows: 34% ‐ originality, 33% ‐ quality of work, 33% ‐ demonstrated use of Microsoft PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 business intelligence software.
“Use your own data set or choose from one of the public data sources below (please right click on the link to open a new tab/window): Microsoft Contoso BI Demo Dataset for Retail Industry, InfoChimps, US Census, The World Bank. Complete the challenge and upload a JPEG of the finished result as a screen shot,” Microsoft said.
The contest was launched in January 22, 2010, and is scheduled to end on February 3. Formerly referred to as codename Project Gemini, PowerPivot is an add-in for Excel 2010 designed to deliver powerful data analysis capabilites.
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