Our first meetup: Come and hear our two amazing guest speakers.

Wow: What a lineup for our first meetup. Two Microsoft MVPs for the price of none at our very first meetup! That's UNBEATABLE value. Double Wow: We're in the process of merging this Microsoft Excel Meetup Group with the Wellington PowerBI group. So now we've got you covered no matter whether you play with small data, big data, or somewhere-in-between data! More on this in due course.

Here's what's in store in this joint Excel/PowerBI event:

Purna "Chandoo" Duggirala: 5 Amazing tricks to make your dashboards awesome.

Chandoo is a Microsoft Excel MVP, Author, Trainer, Blogger, and Excel dashboarding legend. If you've ever googled any two of the following three terms:

• Excel

• Dashboard

• Awesome

...then chances are you've already familiar with him.

Chandoo recently moved to our fine shores in order to further his global ambition to make people become awesome in Excel. So please swing by, and welcome him to middle Excel earth.

Chandoo will be covering simple but effective tricks to make awesome looking dashboards. Learn about alert icons, shapes, sparklines, alignment and space. (Spacesuits optional).

Reza Rad: Data Preparation with PowerQuery for Power BI and Excel

Reza Rad is an Auckland-based Sql Server MVP, Author, Trainer, Blogger, and PowerBI Guru. Check out his bio at http://radacad.com/reza

In this demo-heavy session Reza will show what you can achieve using Power Query, the data extraction, transformation, and mash up tool. Power Query can be accessed through Excel or from Power BI Desktop, and has numerous data transformation features that can be used to solve real-world data preparation challenges.

Reza will use customer case studies to go through scenarios of preparing data for modelling and visualization. He'll cover:

• How to use features of Power Query such as generators and custom functions

• What built-in functions are available to solve your data challenges

• Data preparation techniques through Excel

• ... and much more!

Reza is also running his ever-popular Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star training event the following day. See http://goo.gl/o5fKzc for details on how to book, as there are still a few spots left. And be sure to spread the word among your rookie co-workers by way of thanks for his time at the meetup. Here’s the outline for anyone that’s interested. I’m certainly going to the training, and hope to see you there:

Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star: Friday 9 Sept.

In this training course you will learn Power BI from beginner to advance. You will learn how to use Power BI for simple data analysis situations as well as complex business intelligence scenarios. You will learn about Power BI Desktop, Power BI Website, and components of Power BI which are; Get and Transform (or Power Query), Modeling (or Power Pivot), and Visualization. You will also learn about Power Query Formula Language (Called M informally), and DAX. This course designed to give you an end to end view of Power BI, so you be able to use Power BI straight away in your everyday challenges for data analysis.