Ginger Grant, an Excel Trainer, blogger and PASS Business Analytics Conference speaker focusing on Power BI and all the Power Excel Tools, joins the Excel TV panel to talk about Excel, data and Data Science. Check out her blog, DesertIsleSQL.com.
What Is Your Website About?
Rick: You have a website called DesertIsleSQL.com. Would you mind talking about your website and give us an idea of what it is about?
Ginger: My website is where I post information about Excel, PowerBI, and whatever I am working. If it interests me, it ends up on my blog.
Jordan and Rick were recently PASS Business Analytics Conference speakers – as was Ginger. Jordan related that he met Ginger first as an Ernst and Young employee in her Excel course.
Why DesertIsleSQL ?
Pop-culture reference from Szilvia – Your DesertIsleSQL website is named after Gilligan’s Island character movie star Ginger Grant. Tell us about the evolution of your blog name?
Ginger: I wanted something catchy. Something memorable – at least for people of a certain age!
What Kind Of Topics On Your Blog?
Szilvia: Do you delve into tangential topics?
Ginger: I talk about Excel because Excel is the single largest data store in the world with half a billion users. Everybody knows Excel. Microsoft has brought people to interesting data related topics with Excel.
How Has Your Blog Evolved?
Jordan: Your blog has branched into many topics. Can you talk about that evolution?
Ginger: It is a reflection of where I am. I started with .Net and I kept going back into data and SQL. Data has to be moved forward in a format that’s meaningful and useful and I believe that is Excel. Having data in a database is worthless unless you can pull it out and give it to somebody in a form that can make sense to people. That’s what Power BI is about; analyzing data. Excel is where you store data and whatever you happen to do to analyze it. One of the big things about Power BI is the ability to tell a story through pictures. The data you present in spreadsheets doesn’t necessarily do it for everyone. Making pictures with data helps.
What Is Your Day Job?
Rick: You started with .Net and at that point you called yourself a programmer. What is the name of what you do right now?
Ginger: I like to call it Data Science. I do data analysis and presentation. I try to make sense of people’s data.
Rick: What is your day job?
Ginger: I am a consultant for Pragmatic Works currently teaching a Data Science course. I also meet with clients teaching them how to use their Excel spreadsheets and move data into Power BI. I also take data from Oracle to SQL so they can do analysis. I work with Microsoft data wherever it happens to be.
- Jon Acampora of ExcelCampus.com - October 5, 2017
- Nick Green of EchoXL.com - September 14, 2017
- Ken Puls of ExcelGuru.ca - July 26, 2017
