On Saturday I got back from the winter 2013 MVP summit at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. The summit is a great chance to talk to the Microsoft Excel teams and to meet up with other Excel MVPs.
I also spent some time with the Excel Mac team and the Mac MVPs trying to understand the Excel development environment on the Mac, and time with the BI teams and SQL server MVPs.
Everything discussed is under strict NDA, so I can’t give you any details but it was all very interesting!
Surface 2
All the attending MVPs got a special offer on a 32Gb Surface 2 (RT). I must admit I had not planned on buying this because it does not support the development environment (VBA and Visual Studio) I need, but the offer was too good to refuse!
But after playing with it for a few hours I am very impressed. It comes with Excel, Outlook, Word and Powerpoint, 200 GB of Skydrive and a years worth of Skype. I added a 64GB micro SD card as the D: drive and a Bluetooth mouse.
For office use, with Email, web browsing and photos this is a great machine: you very quickly get using to touching the screen (and wishing my main laptop worked like that).
Geek Meet
Here are some snaps from the monday evening reception:
Roger Govier and Zak Barrese discussing the finer points of Apps for Office.
Patrick Matthews, Bob Umlas and Bill Jelen: Pivot Tables or Array Formulas?
Kevin (Zorvek) Jones does not look convinced by Zak(FireFyter)’s explanation of the Office 365 SKUs
Zak (and another thing …) Barrese ignores Sam Rad and Ingeborg (Teylyn) Hawighorst showing off an orange something!
Felipe Gualberto and Ken Puls: which DAX function would you use to compare apples with oranges? Ken looks horrified: someone must have suggested VLOOKUP instead of CALCULATE!
Jacob Hildebrand and Jordan Goldmeier: Jordan shows what happens when you unwind Clippy – Jacob patiently waits for another seat to become free.
Roger Govier and Sam Rad say cheese for the camera whilst Ingeborg and Liam Bastick discuss the idea of arranging an Excel User Conference in OZ/NZ in 2015 with lots of MVP speakers (hopefully including me, Bill Jelen, Ken Puls, Bob Umlas …)
Mystery Photo
Here is this year’s mystery photo: exactly where can you find this dragon?
Excel and UDF Performance Stuff 
It was very fun!
Nice snaps. Yes please to an Excel conference in NZ. Tell you what: do it in Wellington and I’ll help you sell tickets!
Well, maybe you can help Ingeborg organise a location in Wellington and sell tickets etc: please private email to me if you think you can help.
“…because it does not support the development environment (VBA….)”
What do you mean – I thought you could load the full Office Suite – with VBA off course…
It is the Surface 2: uses Windows RT and comes preloaded with the RT version of Office, which does not support VBA. The Surface 2 Pro uses the ordinary version of Windows and you can load the full version of Office iuncluding VBA.
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