You signup for the course and you have about 2 hrs of connect time with the lab. You [...]]]> Buried in the launching of CTP3/beta2 bits, is this tidbit: “Microsoft Virtual Lab: PowerPivot for Excel 2010”. Basically this facility is a remotely hosted VM with Excel 2010, PowerPivot for Excel and SQL Server 2008 R2 RDBMS. WOW!

You signup for the course and you have about 2 hrs of connect time with the lab. You don’t need anything on your desktop except a browser and an ActiveX control for the terminal server part. Everything is hosted remotely. You don’t have to build a VM; nor managed it; nor worry about cleanup afterwards. After signing up, it takes a minute or so to fire up and – there you are – you are connected to a remote image with all of the software pre-loaded and ready to go. Didn’t finish in an hour, signup for a second one.

The available database in the image is the Contoso Retail DW – which is a nice couple of million row fact tables; maybe 10-15 dimensions. The data is mostly sales and marketing related, i.e. “Who bought what, when, when, how?” kind of stuff.

To actually go through the labs, you have two options: you can walk through the labs and do the exercises yourself (the lessons are organized step-by-step on the right-hand side of the screen), or (my favorite) just poke around with the data. You are not restricted to run just the lab.Try loading the data; create a few views; build all of the data mashups you want to. Enter in your own DAX formulas – all within the host VM. Or you can do a combination of these two approaches: begin with the normal lessons, but deviate from them as your interest guides you. An old hackers dream.  NOW THAT IS WAY COOL! All at zero cost and at almost zero footprint on your client machine. And if you like this idea, don’t be shy. There are lots of other virtual labs for other topics from the same Microsoft group. Check them out!

Click here: https://cmg.vlabcenter.com/default.aspx?moduleid=ad3bd3e9-8d2b-498d-94fa-e41e1b09730d for the actual lab. There is also a link from PowerPivot.com (http://www.powerpivot.com/videos.aspx and then click on “Hands on Lab”).

While this lab focuses on just the client components of PowerPivot, we hope to have a matching PowerPivot for SharePoint virtual lab available later.

I STRONGLY RECOMMEND IT! Particularly to those folks who cannot install Excel 2010 on their desktop.

Enjoy.