We welcome Power Platform expertise in the form of Two Alex! Alex Dupler and Alex Powers both work at Microsoft. The organization they work for and their first names aren't the only thing that these two share! They also both have a lot of experience with and passion for the Power Platform. Alex Powers is a member of the Power BI Customer Advisory Team (PBICAT), and Alex Dupler is a Program Manager focused on BI & Data Infrastructure. These guys know data!

Follow Two Alex:

Alex Dupler Twitter

Alex Powers Twitter

Two Alex Youtube Channel

References in this Episode:

Raw Data with Brad and Kai from Agree Media

Episode Timeline:

• 7:00 - The woes of Stack Ranking, Data storage options, more fun with names!
• 22:00 - What draws you to data?, The value (and drawbacks) of Excel, and the path to Power BI
• 36:40 - Two Alex-similarities and differences, Rob tells a story of someone crossing him, and one of Rob's favorites-the art of using BI to drive action
• 59:00 - When BI and IT collide, the 2 Alex's non-traditional BI path, the value of being an expert even if you aren't THE expert
• 1:16:00 - Two Alex LOVE helping people, is there value to documentation?, knowing the Business portion of Business Intelligence
• 1:37:00 - Advertising performance discussion

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00):
Hello friends. Today's guests are Alex Powers and Alex Dupler, collectively known as Two Alex. They're both Microsoft employees in very different roles, but both have their feet rooted firmly in the power platform. You might be familiar with their YouTube show. I interact with them primarily on Twitter and a little bit on Reddit. And this is the first time I've had really any conversation of length with Alex Powers. And it's the first time I've had any conversation at all with Alex Dupler. And no surprise here, really, really cool people. We had a lot of fun, really dynamic and inspiring, interesting conversation that wound through a number of topics, including some show favorites, like non-traditional backgrounds, and closing the action loop, and imposter syndrome. We talk about how years ago Alex Powers wrote a review of my book that called out the intermission in the book and how, what a delight that was at the time to read.

Rob Collie (00:00:57):
And that leads to a conversation about how we're always essentially at our own little intermission in our expertise curve. You're always in the middle somewhere. And if we started doing metrics on this podcast, you'd probably find that this one ranked very highly in opinions expressed per minute. Ooh. What could he mean? Let's get into it.

Announcer (00:01:21):
Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:01:25):
This is the Raw Data By P3 Adaptive podcast. With your host, Rob Collie, and your cohost Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:49):
Welcome to the show. Alex Powers and Alex Dupler. How are you today, gentlemen?

Alex Dupler (00:01:54):
I'm doing great. It's great to chat with you.

Alex Powers (00:01:56):
Rob, back-to-back meetings. I'm glad that Luke found us some time here. I was so hesitant about this podcast, just cause I love listening to it. I was like, "I don't know, should I do it? Should I do it? Should I do it?"

Rob Collie (00:02:08):
The answer is yes, you should do it.

Alex Powers (00:02:10):
I appreciate Alex D and Rob just pulling us all together. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:02:13):
We've already backstage a little bit been laughing about this. So let's bring it out to the front stage. The two of you combined, what do we refer to you as? Are you the Two Alex's? Or something different?

Alex Dupler (00:02:23):
So we learned separately from our wives that the correct pluralization is two Alex.

Rob Collie (00:02:30):
See, I just don't buy this. I still think Alex's. I mean, we could get really funky and say, Alexi.

Tom LaRock (00:02:36):
I was going to say, that's what I think. Yeah, Alexa,

Rob Collie (00:02:39):
But I mean, think of it this way. There's fish, and that's plural. But even there, there's still fishes, which refers to different species of fish. Yes. I think. Is that what it is?

Alex Powers (00:02:51):
Yeah, that's right. Fishy. Yes.

Rob Collie (00:02:53):
I don't know. So the two Alex, are you guys seriously going to go by that now? Is that going to be the new thing, or?

Alex Dupler (00:02:58):
Well, the YouTube channel is called Two Alex.

Rob Collie (00:03:01):
How'd the two of you come to know one another? Is it just like, oh, we're both working in data and we're both named Alex. So you're like, you see each other from across the room and your eyes meet across the internet?

Alex Powers (00:03:10):
I would say across the internet, for sure there. Just because he's up in Redmond, I'm kind of located in St. Louis, Missouri. From there it was kind of this, I think natural, just both being active in the community. Alex D you can keep me honest there, I'm sure we were connecting on Twitter a little bit there before, definitely in the subreddits. One of my earliest memories of was, Hey, this thing isn't folding. And I was like, oh my gosh, it's Power Query. I've got to tackle this. I've got to answer this question. Reddit is where I hang out at. I would say from there that's when we really started coming chat more and more, but Alex D I'll let you kind of tell your side of the story.

Alex Dupler (00:03:43):
Yeah. Yeah. My recollection is that the first time we interacted with each other, where it wasn't just some random poster on Reddit, was side conversations on Microsoft teams within Microsoft. There's some internal discussions where salespeople can get their question answered and sometimes the questions are interesting. And so, yeah we had some side conversations. Plus back then, when Alex wasn't on the product team, he didn't always have full visibility into the roadmap. And so we would chat on the side about what we would do with the roadmap. Not that we would do a better job, just a different job.

Rob Collie (00:04:19):
Yeah, I get you. Yeah, I understand. I understand. What are the two of your roles at Microsoft today?

Alex Dupler (00:04:25):
I work for Microsoft advertising. We're the organization that sells the ads that go on Bing, as well as some partner websites like Yahoo search and AOL search and stuff like that. And I work in the business function of the sales org. So I do BI for a sales team. And it just happens to be at Microsoft, and that influences the technologies that we use. IPM are like data warehouse and big cube stuff.

Rob Collie (00:04:50):
Cool. We're going to have to circle back to that for sure. And Alex P what are you up to these days?

Alex Powers (00:04:56):
Yep. So senior program manager on the Power BI customer advisory team, so PBI CAT for maybe those out in the community. I'm called as kind of that last bastion of hope sometimes, where I'm not very close to the solution, not close to the architecture, just come in and fix it. Where Alex D, he owns the solution, he owns the finished product. That's a line of visibility that I completely lose in my day to day. But you get variety, you get to do different things. Some days it's maybe a DAX challenge, next day I'm writing C#. The next day, I'm writing kind of new report, kind of clicky, clicky, draggy droppy experiences. So a vast rich tapestry of Power BI.

Rob Collie (00:05:32):
So you're on the CAT team with a number of people that have already been on the show, right? Adam Saxton, Casper, Chris Webb. You're part of that crew?

Alex Powers (00:05:41):
Yep.

Rob Collie (00:05:41):
I hear that that crew continues to expand, it's like this great gravitational attractor. It's like just hoovering all of these people. Let's just have it on the record. Does the Power BI CAT team have ambitions of world takeover?

Alex Powers (00:05:53):
Every day. And I think what you're seeing right now is a lot of formality. Community contributors, experts, decades of experience. They're now turning into bosses, they're now turning into managers. So they're getting further away from the technology and kind of now being people managers. I'm enjoying our livestream here because Rob is laughing. He's like, oh, I know that exact feeling.

Rob Collie (00:06:14):
I do. I do, right. I got a request today from some media outlet to interview me for Power BI tips. And I'm like, gosh folks, I'm probably not that person. You want to talk about strategy, okay, that's different. But I have gotten further and further. I still build some Power BI stuff for sure, for my own purposes. But I don't have that day to day, like, this is my life. That's not how my day goes anymore. I'm back to the management game after years of being out of it. Yeah. Growing a company tends to keep you out of the actual hands-dirty data trenches that started the whole thing.

Alex Dupler (00:06:52):
Well, if you ever start stack ranking, that's when it's going to be time to sell it.

Rob Collie (00:06:56):
True story, stack ranking was the reason why I actually stopped being a manager at Microsoft. At one point, I just said, I'm done applying the system for you. I was sick of it. And I understand it's gone now. I found out the hard way that stepping back from a management position didn't just relieve me of that stack ranking thing that I found immoral and uncool. It also took me out of a lot of the important conversations. I just didn't have nearly the input or influence that I had before. And that was hard. If I was still at Microsoft today, my career at Microsoft would still have suffered like a multi-year setback because of this era where I just said, I'm done. I know that at this point, the whole stack rank thing has been gone for a long time, but it was still a number of years later after I left that it still persisted. No, we're never going to do that. We're never going to play lifeboat with human beings. I mean, it really sucked, right? Basically, if you built a really good team, either by recruiting or by development or both, you were punished for it.

Alex Dupler (00:08:04):
Yeah. Apply this to Alex's team. You want to stack rank Chris Webb and Casper and Adam?

Tom LaRock (00:08:09):
I will. I'll do it.

Rob Collie (00:08:11):
Which one of them gets told that they had a terrible year? Right?

Tom LaRock (00:08:16):
I'd be happy to do it.

Rob Collie (00:08:20):
Hey, listen. As long as we put that kind of phenomenal power in the hands of a benevolent tyrant, like Tom, it's perfectly safe. What could go wrong?

Alex Dupler (00:08:29):
That is what they said about solar winds.

Tom LaRock (00:08:34):
My first criteria, having known them for many years, is Jaeger consumption. So we'll just start with that and work our way down the stack.

Rob Collie (00:08:44):
Which way are we going to sort that list though? We sort it largest to smallest, or smallest to largest? I mean, I could see that list being sorted either way.

Tom LaRock (00:08:50):
We'll try it both ways and see how it shakes out.

Rob Collie (00:08:53):
Yeah. I mean, it could be like a honeypot, right? Put some Jaeger out there, see who goes for it? You're getting the 3.0. We won't be doing any of that, thankfully. Now, Alex P, you were previously in a different role, right?

Alex Powers (00:09:10):
Yes. So, here at Microsoft less than two years, came in through the premier field engineer side to support, really had a blast there kind of proactive engagements training, probably train like 4,000 Tableau users on the Power BI. So just like the grind of doing it day in, day out, talking about the product, I just absolutely loved that. Transitioned to kind of field sales roles. There it's competitor competes, a lot of disinformation where they're saying, well, Power BI can never do this. What do you mean it can't do that? Here's an article. Here's me, kind of the whizzbang demo. That's probably where I got my hyperlink chops for those that kind of know me on the community.

Alex Powers (00:09:44):
This is the good and bad of the pandemic is like, Hey, we're making some career advancements, we're working long hours, whatever else it may be. A lot of my goal whiteboard over here was, Hey, I want to be on the Power BI CAT team. Had that visibility, just kind of did those grinding over the fall and winter months when we're all stuck inside. But I'm sorry, Thomas. I don't know how good I would be at the Jaeger thing, just because I don't have that peer connection. I haven't met my coworkers. So that's tough for a lot of people that I think are just making career jumps during the pandemic right now.

Rob Collie (00:10:16):
Yeah. I mean, it's weird. I live in a completely altered reality where we've been a hundred percent remote, I've been a hundred percent remote for 11 years. Probably more closer to 12, actually. Our company was a hundred percent remote from the beginning, basically out of necessity. To me, it's shocking how many people who've been at this company for a long time have never met each other face to face. We did a gathering, a team gathering in 2019. We didn't do one in 2020. I don't remember why we didn't do that. We haven't done one this year, either. We're hoping to maybe do one in 2022. We've hired so many people in the last year that there's like half the company that I haven't ever been in person with.

Alex Powers (00:11:02):
It's tough.

Rob Collie (00:11:03):
It's different, isn't it?

Alex Powers (00:11:04):
Yeah. I think it was like the good meme the other day where it's like, Hey, here's your company culture, it's just like an empty cubicle. And it's like, well, people don't even have that anymore. It's just, here's your new job, here's your new email. Log in, welcome to the company. Great friend of mine, Mark Beedle, I know kind of joined T3 adaptive. I love that he's like, this is where I want to be. I think of the P3 of the past, where you take the group, I think, up to Seattle or some of the different areas. And then it was like, oh wow, they're all getting together and having fun. You know, I tried applying for the job, but unfortunately your Excel file was corrupt and I couldn't pass the test.

Rob Collie (00:11:36):
Oh, I see. I see how this [crosstalk 00:11:38].

Alex Powers (00:11:38):
Yeah, what happened with that, Rob?

Rob Collie (00:11:39):
I don't know, man.

Alex Powers (00:11:40):
That's really what I wanted to corner you on today.

Rob Collie (00:11:43):
That might've been part of the test, Alex.

Alex Powers (00:11:45):
I literally thought it was, that responded that way. I was like, I don't know if they're testing me with a corrupted file.

Alex Dupler (00:11:50):
Yeah. You need to have mastered the Open XML format of the Excel file, and be able to track down the corruption in the Power Query.

Rob Collie (00:12:00):
I saw a joke or a meme on some social media a couple of years ago about cast iron, the hipsters with their cast iron and how you have to take care of it and everything like that. And then after you're done with that, you have to dry it in the sun for 24 hours. And someone goes, 24 hours? And they go, yeah, if you're not willing to go to the Arctic, you don't deserve cast iron. So it's like that kind of test. Yeah.

Alex Dupler (00:12:23):
We beat the crap out of our cast iron, it's just fine.

Rob Collie (00:12:26):
Okay. And now Alex Dupler. You're working in BI in the advertising wing, within Bing but also the affiliated networks like Yahoo and things like that. And so you mentioned that you're in charge of the data warehouse and you're in charge of, you said big cube.

Alex Dupler (00:12:42):
Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:12:43):
For a year I worked on Bing, and maybe this is a completely different dataset than what you actually end up caring about, but the state of the world back then was there was this giant distributed commodity hardware database system, data storage system called Cosmos.

Alex Dupler (00:12:58):
Yep.

Rob Collie (00:12:58):
One of the world's foremost write-only data stores. It was amazing at storing data. You could never get anything useful out of it. There was only one person in the entire organization, named Jamie Buckley, who was capable of actually running queries against this thing. And so if you wanted any information whatsoever about what searches were being run and things like that, yeah sure, you could try to write a query against this thing. And what would happen is you'd get syntax error after syntax error after syntax error, and then eventually you kick off a query and it wouldn't give you any errors. And you're like sweet. And it would run and run and run and you go away and you'd come back like a day and a half later and then you'd get a runtime error.

Alex Dupler (00:13:38):
Yeah. And when it works, you get a CSV. And so we still have that. I think when I was getting trained on it, which they said it had something like 5% of the world's data in it. Cause it's not just Bing, it's X-Box and a whole bunch of stuff. It's this really cool exabyte scale thing. But nobody knows how to use it, partially because it uses scope scripts, which the only commercial product they've ever been used in is the ATLS gen one analytics feature, which was not a successful product and is being deprecated. And so you can't hire people that know how to use it, there's just like a bunch of vendors that have learned it. And I can't write it either. Also, I don't know if this was your experience, but the engineers are allergic to writing documentation. It's got these petabyte sized tables with 400 columns and there'll be a data dictionary and it doesn't have any descriptions of any of the columns.

Rob Collie (00:14:33):
This does match my experience, yes.

Alex Dupler (00:14:35):
So we use that some, we also have other partners. I mean, it's a huge organization. We just missed getting touted in the quarterly earnings as having crossed $10 billion for the last fiscal year. I think the public number is like 9.95 or 9.5 billion. Yeah so it's a real business, even though the market share is pretty small. It turns out advertising is just a really, really good business. So we take a bunch of data out of there, and then also from partners that take data in there, and put it all in Databricks and make it available to folks that way. And we love Databricks because our analysts, they can come with whatever skills they have, and they can be successful on day one. Because they don't have to learn SCOPE or KQL or whatever.

Alex Dupler (00:15:22):
They can write Python, they can write R, they can write SQL, there's a cube so they can do Power BI, they can do Excel. They can do whatever they want, all in the same data. Now, if they want to do things that are super fancy, they may have a hard time using the cube. So they got to write something.

Rob Collie (00:15:41):
Yeah.

Alex Dupler (00:15:42):
But if you're a PM owning a project, you can drag and drop in that cube all day long and have a good time. And then the other thing that we like about the setup we have is, with the data in Data Lake, our partners that have their own generous Azure budgets, they're not running queries against our server. Whereas if we put it in Synapse or SQL, when they want to query our data, we're paying for this compute. But here they just mount it onto their own compute system, and they pay for it. And that's great. We like when other people pay to use our data.

Rob Collie (00:16:15):
So it's funny, I actually expected that the answer to the question was going to be, oh no, no, we fixed all that. That original system is completely straightened out, it's got a much more human friendly interface. But it turns out that you just have other systems that are human friendly. And those things have to... on the order of one-time investments to figure out how to populate those things from the great Oracle that is Cosmos.

Alex Dupler (00:16:41):
Yeah that's largely true. I mean, in Cosmos, they've implemented the ATLS APIs. So you can mount data in Cosmos directly to a Spark engine and do stuff that way, if you want. Yeah. Basically that's how they've done things. You will not be surprised to learn that Microsoft likes to reuse names. Maybe you've seen this phenomenon before in the word power, but yeah. Cosmos, the internal exabyte scale data platform is not the same as Cosmos DB, the Azure product, which is for, I couldn't even describe it. It's for, like, everything.

Rob Collie (00:17:19):
Yeah. I mean, there's only so many cool nouns. And furthermore, the set of cool nouns in the world is further refined by the ones that computer scientists gravitate to. So you end up with a really small population of words. And the chances... It's like the pigeonhole principle from math, right? You need 450 names, you only have 300 words. So you're screwed. And so you end up with things like the word dashboard being repurposed to mean something kind of niche in Power BI. That's one that I wish we could get a do-over on. And you know, I'm a sinner. I named some things poorly in my day. I'll give you an example. When PowerPivot V1, and actually several versions of PowerPivot, at least in 2010, there were those two drop zones, extra drop zones in the pivot table field list, for slicers.

Rob Collie (00:18:11):
Cause Amir insisted that we make slicer layout really easy as opposed to tedious. So we had these extra drop zones, and one drop zone put the slicers down the left-hand side of the pivot table and one put them across the top of the pivot table. What did I name those two zones? Horizontal and vertical slicers. For years after that, when I taught that product to classes, they go, oh, what does a horizontal slicer do that's different than a vertical slicer? And I just sit there with my head in my hands like, it should have been left and top, Rob. Why did you... Previous Rob, why were you so nerdy and stupid at the same time? Left and top.

Alex Dupler (00:18:48):
Well you see, in an indimensional cube, there are some things that are horizontal and some things that are vertical. Once you understand what the tubal is, it'll all make sense.

Rob Collie (00:18:59):
Yes. So let's go back to basics and... Yeah, no. It's just left and top. Yep. These are what you call own goals. Can't make these things up. It's even funnier, by that point in my career when I made that mistake, I was already kind of like this rabid high priest of naming. Like, we should be better. And here I was in the course of delivering those sermons, just committing tremendous sins out the back of the church. It's just like.

Alex Dupler (00:19:31):
Yeah, it turns out we should be better in, oh crap, I got an hour before this presentation, what am I going to call this thing? Those are two overlapping states of being.

Rob Collie (00:19:41):
You know, people's hearts are in the right place. So I still think that the two of you probably might've gravitated toward each other just a little bit, maybe like 1% more, because of the shared first name. Can I be allowed like an extra 1% gravity on this?

Alex Powers (00:19:54):
99. I mean, a lot of Alex's within Microsoft that are doing Power BI, we've all kind of banded together.

Rob Collie (00:19:59):
There's like an Alex crew?

Alex Powers (00:20:01):
Hell yeah. Big time. There's multiple Two Alex's, too.

Rob Collie (00:20:04):
As we've established, once you get above like three or four Alex, it's suddenly Alex's. That's when it becomes plural.

Alex Dupler (00:20:10):
There are at least two Alex's working at Microsoft in the Power BI ecosystem that are smarter than either of us.

Rob Collie (00:20:17):
Well I mean, going back to something we were talking about earlier, every single person, every single consultant at P3 is a hell of a lot better at Power BI than I ever was. I can't even argue that it's like, oh, I'm off my peak. It's not that at all. They were always going to be much, much better. It's very humbling. Like in the real sense of the word, when you sort of get put in your place.

Alex Powers (00:20:40):
Is this like a time thing, Rob? Cause I feel it too. It's like the early days, Power Pivot and Power Query were something like, I'm digging, I'm learning all of these things. And then like everything else is kind of passing me by and it's like, yeah I'll catch up to that at some point. And I see the wild stuff that people are doing nowadays, like, I don't know what nights and weekends they're spending learning this product, but I'm working twice as hard and I'm still not catching up.

Alex Dupler (00:21:00):
Yeah. I was watching the other demo the other day. And he was talking about how you should have your report and your data model in two separate PBIX's. This was Mike Carlo. It was a great demo. But then he was like, and to make this really easy, what we're going to do is we're going to edit the PBIX. And I was like, hold on a second. You can't do that. That's not allowed.

Rob Collie (00:21:22):
[crosstalk 00:21:22] Like actually hacking the file? Like he got into the file structure?

Alex Dupler (00:21:25):
Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:21:26):
I do love me some file hacking. For me, I think it's not necessarily a question of time. It's actually that the universe has returned to its default state with respect to me. Which is, the whole time I worked at Microsoft, in all the years I was on the engineering teams, I worked with plenty of people who were super technical, but also enthusiastically technical. When VB.Net came out, and ASP.NET, I had some colleagues that just dove into that. They loved it, it was the most amazing thing. And I just could never... I was still at that point going like, okay, well I learned how to write my VBA, and I'm sticking with it. That's where the frontier of my coding, actual procedural coding, is still VBA six.

Rob Collie (00:22:09):
For some reason, DAX and data modeling, as technical tools go, DAX and data modeling really, really spoke to me. Like I freaking loved it and still do, still do to this day. And Excel formulas are kind of the same thing, right? This is the handful of exceptional technologies that really seem to appeal to my nervous system, and none of the others do. And by the way, M is another example that does not appeal to me at all.

Alex Powers (00:22:38):
I am the opposite. I love M.

Rob Collie (00:22:39):
Really? You love M?

Alex Powers (00:22:40):
I love, love, love. Hell yeah.

Rob Collie (00:22:42):
You're not my species then, you're something completely different.

Alex Dupler (00:22:47):
So I think one of the big things that drew me to data modeling, so there's a lot of constraints. And with programming, it's like, there's such an open world. Like the only programming I could ever really get my head around was VBA. That's where I started. You didn't have to have a big, complicated object model. There was just Excel. That was your object model. And it made everything so much easier. And you're like, okay, well, what I'm trying to do is move these cells to those cells. And with data modeling, especially in Power BI, it's like, well, I need one column for these relationships. And I need these relationships to flow in one direction. The constraints make it a much more manageable problem, but also opens up room for more creativity.

Rob Collie (00:23:30):
I agree. And also VBA comes with a macro recorder, the world's greatest set of training wheels. It's like, if I want to build an app from scratch, I can't like act out like pantomime what the app will do, and have something spit out code for it.

Alex Dupler (00:23:48):
Draw some stick fingers in Figma and just drag them around, and get some code from that.

Rob Collie (00:23:51):
Yeah. It's like, mock up the UI in Balsamiq or something, or Vizio, and then start mashing on the screen with your finger and say, okay. And then speaking out loud, what should happen at that... there's no macro recording for actual software developers.

Alex Dupler (00:24:04):
I think we got to tell Charles that, that's what he's got to do with his AI driven power apps development.

Rob Collie (00:24:09):
Yeah. It's we need to turn this into a LARPing thing, right? You just act out the application in the real world with these cameras... Holo lens. There it is. We've solved the world's problems. Take that for low code development.

Alex Powers (00:24:26):
Well, I like how Power Automate's now watching your points and clicks, and generating flows for you.

Rob Collie (00:24:32):
See, I didn't know that it did that.

Alex Powers (00:24:33):
Oh yeah. You're training the machine. You don't even have to write the code anymore. It's like, oh, automation is here. It's really here now.

Rob Collie (00:24:41):
It's always a feel good moment to meet a fellow VBA 6-er. The world used to be lousy with us. We were just everywhere. It's kind of a dying art. Office has got this new JavaScript API, Office Scripts. That's incredible. Again, in theory. I haven't touched it, because it's not reaching out and grabbing me by the eyeballs. I'm tempted though. It's sort of like, oh, a new VBA six and they have a macro recorder and I'm like, okay, maybe, maybe. This might be the way I learn JavaScript someday, is Office Scripts.

Alex Dupler (00:25:09):
Yeah, that sounds like how I'd learn it, except Excel is dead to me. I mean, I use Excel for note taking and PM stuff, but data work, I don't use it. Because first of all, Power Query is the way to go. And in Excel, when you have Power Query over, you can't save the Excel file.

Rob Collie (00:25:28):
Really?

Alex Dupler (00:25:29):
Yeah, Power Query takes a lock, like a lot of the old school windows. And you can't get back to the main-

Rob Collie (00:25:34):
Modal window.

Alex Dupler (00:25:35):
Yeah. So you can't save, you can't refer back to the data. You can't open stuff. And it's not like Excel ever crashes when you're working with lots of data. So saving, it's not that important. And if you want to say, first you have to evaluate your queries or set them to disable load. But if you've already loaded some, if you do something to disable load, it destroys the cells. I just said, I'll do it all in Power BI. No more Excel. Not because there's anything wrong with Excel. It's just that that user experience was just so unacceptable to me. I lost so many hours of work.

Tom LaRock (00:26:10):
Wait, what do you mean, not that there's something wrong... Clearly there's something wrong with Excel.

Alex Dupler (00:26:14):
Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:26:15):
Alex, you're cut from a cloth that I understand very well. Your sarcastic cynicism is, ooh, it speaks to me. Yeah, we've come to the right place. Even I, team Excel guy, I am really on team Excel. I haven't written any DAX in the Excel environment in several years. It's all Power BI, all the time now.

Alex Dupler (00:26:38):
The other big thing is why would you want to write DAX in an environment that you can't schedule to refresh? Unless you don't have pro licenses, like...

Alex Powers (00:26:47):
Hold on, let me challenge you now. Here we go, this is a little taste of Two Alex. So I love Ken Puls, where he's saying, Hey, I don't want the heavy weight of Power BI. If I can do as much as possible within Excel, be it Power Query or even Power Pivot. I would agree that.

Alex Powers (00:27:03):
Be it kind of power query or even power pivot. I would agree that the development experience is severely lacking. That's not to say that the power BI side is the best in the world, obviously Dax studio, et cetera. But I would much rather take a lightweight application over a heavy one every day and then just import that data model into power BI when I'm ready.

Rob Collie (00:27:19):
To me, the primary value of these technologies in Excel is as an on-ramp to the power BI universe for the authors. Tomorrow's power BI authors are today living in Excel. And the reason, I've said this multiple times on this podcast of multiple different people at Microsoft, but the reason why I'm, I don't want to use like the passive aggressive version of the word disappointed. Let's use the completely neutral version of the word disappointed. The reason why I'm disappointed that there isn't more investment there is because that is the gateway drug, and as a universe, as a community, like we really need to care about bringing those new people on. And that's where they're going to come to. To tell those same people, "No, put Excel down and start learning this in a completely new environment," their immune systems reject that because they've been sold a million times on the idea that something's going to replace Excel. They know better by now.

Rob Collie (00:28:23):
But no one in that category, like the V lookup and pivot route, none of them resist the idea of there being crazy, powerful new versions and features of the things that they're already doing. You get them 48 hours into that new world, and they're more than happy to switch to the power BI environment. They're excited about it. Those same people who would have rejected it 48 hours before. You got to take them on that path and this thing not getting the love that I think it deserves, I understand it's from the perspective of our real production environment is the power BI environment. I get that. But the on-ramp, they are doing some things about that, even things that I didn't know, because they're targeted at people who don't know about this stuff and I already do. Brian, when he was on the podcast, was talking about how they're using machine learning, advanced clippy generation seven, to detect the people who should be interested in this stuff and sort of pointing them to power BI. And there actually was really good uptake of that. That feature didn't fire for me because I don't use V Lookup or regular pivot tables anymore.

Alex Dupler (00:29:23):
That's almost exactly the journey that I went on. Like many of your guests, I did not go to school for power BI. I actually, I went to school for chemistry and I worked as a chemist for a couple of years. I was doing lab work and I was very bad at lab work. I mean, I understood the chemistry, but I would break glassware that was expensive and stuff like that. Which when you make $15 an hour, breaking expensive glassware is a good way to get in trouble. So I was like "Okay, well I grew up in a very computer centric family. Maybe I can do some of this Excel stuff." And so I was doing visual basic, and we were doing some dashboards, like operational reporting. And I had Excel in this company. I loved the people there, but it was not a successful business. We had maybe a hundred thousand dollars in revenue per employee with high CapEx, because we had these big, expensive instruments that we had to buy and chemicals and all sorts of stuff, lots of HVAC. So there was not enough money to pay people to live in Seattle, so every office license was a battle.

Alex Powers (00:30:31):
Wow.

Alex Dupler (00:30:31):
I was looking at, okay, what can I do with Excel 2007, because we had some of that I think we had enough licenses, but it didn't really check. So we didn't really pay too much attention. But then I was like wanting to use power query because I had sort of discovered it was easier, but I couldn't. So I was like, "Okay, how do I get this macro to run as a service so that I can refresh these dashboards on these dowels that we bought second hand?"

Rob Collie (00:31:01):
You know, if it weren't for the a hundred thousand dollars of revenue per employee, at a certain point, that story sounded like season two of Breaking Bad. The HVAC, the cap ex, oh you mean a hundred thousand dollars per employee per week? Okay.

Alex Dupler (00:31:18):
No, no, no, per year.

Rob Collie (00:31:19):
Then it's meth.

Alex Dupler (00:31:20):
Yeah, no. So this is the environmental testing industry. And the way it works is your tests have to be defensible to the EPA. So the EPA puts up a spec and says the test needs to be done this way. And when it's done, it has these parameters in terms of statistical reusability. And that means that one lab's product is a commodity compared to the other lab's product. And so you can't get outside profits. All you can do is compete on service and price. And if you take a high CapEx business and bolted to professional services, you're not going to get good margins.

Rob Collie (00:31:59):
Unintended consequences of everything, right?

Alex Dupler (00:32:01):
Yeah. I mean, Rob, can you imagine your business, if you are charging professional services business model, but you bolted on a whole, huge amount of consumable costs to every delivery?

Rob Collie (00:32:14):
Yeah. It sounds like we can safely not choose the wine in front of me.

Alex Dupler (00:32:19):
That's how I first encountered the 2017 standalone web, maybe it was 2016. The first time power BI was split out. I was doing office 365 admins and I got like a push notification. I was like, "This is cool." And I built some stuff and I showed it to my manager and he was like, "That's cool. How much is it?" "$10 a month." "Nope, can't afford it." And that's when I started looking for jobs anywhere where they had good Excel people.

Rob Collie (00:32:46):
Yeah, and to put that in perspective, this is the punchline to many jokes when people ask us how much it is. We go, "It's $10 a month per user." We all just start laughing. Like, "Oh my God, it's like stealing. It's so cheap."

Alex Dupler (00:32:58):
I didn't even have that many users.

Rob Collie (00:33:02):
I mean, this might be $30 a month. You know, like, nope.

Alex Dupler (00:33:06):
No.

Rob Collie (00:33:07):
It's like when we first moved to