Too far? We had an attendee from Oz at the first Excel User Conference, in Fort Worth back in 2005. Plano’s only fifteen or so miles further.

The conference is more of an interactive training event, and the precise course of discussions follows a complicated path based on the specific interests of the attendees, the questions that are asked, and frankly what the instructors happen to have in mind that day. We’re not random, of course, it’s just hard to cover a week’s material in a half day.

As such, there is not a strict syllabus which can be distributed, and no recordings are made of the proceedings.

A great deal of my material matches the various topics on my web site and here in the blog, and a number of these topics are used to provide a framework for the course.

I suppose there is substantial interest in having similar material available. I am thinking about (but not yet acting on) the concept of packaged modules that cover certain topics. You’ll have to wait patiently for these to become available, because as you might imagine, these take time to plan and produce.

Any chance they’ll be Boot Camp proceedings/notes/materials available to download? Unfortunately Texas is a little far for me to travel!

Would especially love any approach to automating the creation of PowerPoint slides directly from Excel.

Cheers,
Mitch
Sydney, Australia

P.S. Keep up the good work!

http://twitter.com/dsainsights

Update 2:
Registration and Info for Excel Dashboard and Visualization Workshop at: http://is.gd/1gWr

Update 1:
Excel Dashboard & Visualization Workshop by Datapig and PTS @Jon_Peltier. Should be very informative!

I’ve had pretty good luck with using one workbook as the source and another as the parent of the pivot table. I think as long as the source is open the first time you refresh the pivot, it recreates links. From then on, you don’t need to open the source to refresh the pivot.

If I need to use CSV files, I will often write some VBA to set up the data source. Which is to say, I steal someone’s VBA, modify it, insert the path of the workbook with the pivot tables (which is presumably the same path as the CSV files), and distribute that set of files.

Don’t quote me on any of this, as I’m not an expert. I’m at the stage I can make it go, without knowing how all the details work.

But I discovered that I would have to instruct my recipients to extract the zip file to *exactly* the same directory path on their C: drive as I had, or it wouldn’t work. I also found that every time I wanted to change the location of the CSV, I had to create a new pivot: I couldn’t find the way to simply redirect the old pivot to the new location.

What was I doing wrong in these two cases? Also, would my recipient need to load up an ODBC driver for .csv at their end, or did my setting it up take care of that?