PowerPivot? PowerPoint?

October 21, 2010 - by Bill Jelen

During the beta, PowerPivot was know as Gemini. When they announced the official name as PowerPivot, I caught myself getting hung up on whether I was talking about PowerPivot or PowerPoint. Dan English even noted that I let one occurence of PowerPoint make it to print in my book about PowerPivot.

I had to smile today when Jim sent me this picture taken at a Barnes & Noble in Fairlawn, Ohio. The clerk in the computer section at least was able to get the PowerPivot book into the Office section, but shelved amongst the PowerPoint titles instead of amongst the Excel titles where it rightly belongs. Note that this is not my book, this is the 4th book on PowerPivot, this one from Marco Russo.

I pulled out the old Fuzzy Match algorithm from MrExcel.com and the =FuzzyPercent(“PowerPivot”,”PowerPoint”) comes in at 55%. I also checked with Easy-XL‘s Levenshtein Distance Fuzzy Matching and it scored a match with a difference of 3. It seems even closer than that, though, with 9 letters in common and the first 6 and last 1 characters in the same sequence. I wonder how much the similarity is confusing others? Of course, being an Excel guy, I think that PowerPivot should get to keep their name and the PowerPoint team should be forced to go with a name that is less confusing! Perhaps “SlideShow Add-In”?

No matter where they shelve the books, if you have Excel 2010, you should check out the amazing PowerPivot add-in from www.PowerPivot.com.