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Have you seen Pivot yet?

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The site is over at https://www.getpivot.com/, and the video is short and very much worth watching.

As a developer, I can only wonder what MSDN would look like with Pivot like they showed for Wikipedia.

Enjoy!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2010
    This is very cool technology.   I have been playing around with the "Big Pivot", but waiting on the SL version to be released this summer.  I do hope they release better tooling for building collections... especially for designing the images.

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2010
    @shaggygi, can you talk about what kinds of collections you're interested in building? Part of the reason why I'm excited is that I believe this is a very flexible way of visualizing and arranging information, and people will find new ways to leverage this for interesting scenarios that we've probably haven't thought of yet.

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2010
    Of course this could be used in many ways for public interaction and viewing data, but I've been using it for internal use at my current job. This has actually improved the quality of our data and processes just by creating simple collections and viewing what we currently have in a few of our databases. Example.  We manufacture products in a specific field.  I did a few collections for products, shipping info, mfg turnbacks, test results, RMAs, specific processes, etc. I believe the Excel tools gets you going very quickly.  However, there is much work needed to create better collections. Some of the improvements may be a lack of my knowledge, but I would like to see the following...

  1. Better way to create a task to query from mutliple sources to create the collections without the need of Excel tool.  I could run a nightly process to create various collections for support teams to review the next day.
  2. Be able to query and view collection on the fly without the need of using Excel tool and/or creating collection first.  e.g. Let's say I wanted to view all the test results from the last 2 hours.  I could have a Silverlight app with some filtering controls ( selection for specific product ) and allow Engineering team to see if something needs to be addressed in process.
  3. Better tutorial on Excel tool.  This is one I need to just sit and play with more.  How do you setup the dates better for filtering.  My collections end up with just checkbox selections.  I saw in a video where they had the slider control similar to narrowing down numbers.  Also, if I have a string value (e.g. 0012345 ), it cuts off the first 2 values making it 12345.  Then the collection looks like a number instead of string.  This makes it have the slider control for filtering instead of a checkbox that I want.  Again, I need to work with it more to fix this.
  4. Image tooling.  I have not figure this one out yet.  So far I just view the collections with the Preview boxes.  I don't know how to create the images based on the records in collection.  It seems that this has to be created first then attached to the records.  This makes it difficult to create collection and publish quickly.  How can you do it programmatically?
  5. Limitation.  We collect a bunch of data.  Some databases have millions of records.  Even when I get up to around 3K records, it seems like Big Pivot is sluggish.  I understand that there will be a limit but also seems that if Pivot is going to be a big hit, it should be able to handle at least in the 100Kish range.
  6. Don't like the way it groups the categories sometime.  On the bottom of the groups, it will show "Name to Name".  You have to click the group to see the data within.  I hope the SL control will allow you enable/disable this and rather allow user to scroll across all individually. Have you seen any details for a more specific date to release Little Pivot ( and/or new Big Pivot and tooling support )?  Other than Summer 2010 of course. Hope this helps:)

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2010
    Just wanted to let you know that summer of 2010 is still the best we can say for when to expect the Silverlight version. I also wanted to thank you for all of this thoughtful advice!

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2010
    Thanks for the update.  I'm sure there will be really good tools and control once released.   Could you at least inform us if it will be a Beta ( Go Live license ) or RTM version in Summer release?   Thanks again.