Purnachandra Duggirala, and Excel MVP from India, shares Excel and Charting tips on his popular blog – Pointy Haired Dilbert – since 2007, and today has over 300 articles and tutorials on using Microsoft Office Excel effectively and making better charts.

Chandoo, as his readers now him as, has authored a six part series on using Excel effectively for project management. Though Project in the Office suite of products is a great product for the purpose but worldwide, several project managers and executives use the number-cruncher Excel for managing projects; frequently due to wider availability.

• Gantt Charts – Project Management Using Excel
• Team To Do Lists – Project Tracking Tools
• Project Status Reporting – Create a Timeline to display milestones
• Time sheets and Resource management
• Issue Trackers & Risk Management
• Project Status Reporting – Dashboard
• Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project Progress

And not just this series, look around on his blog, and you’ll find huge set of Excel resources including free templates to download and an ebook – 95 Excel Tips – if you subscribe to the blog via email.

It’s a cloudy day here in New Delhi, India, but we preferred to skip the usual package of hot cup of tea and munchies for the weekend, and dig nice posts from our MVPs talking about cloud.

No not in a poetic way, but in an Azure way - Tips, how-tos, and tour! After all, a lot of Azure announcements were made at the recently concluded PDC 09 in Los Angeles, USA (Check the Azure container tour in one of the posts).

• SQL Azure – Microsoft SQL Data Services – Introduction and Pricing
• Microsoft Azure Container in Microsoft PDC ‘09
• Configuring Windows Azure development machine
• Azure Start Guide – Step by Step Installation Guide
• SQL Azure Explorer Add-in for VS2010
• How to send Email on Windows Azure Application

Big props to SQL Server MVP Pinal Dave, Solutions Architect MVP and Regional Director Venkatarangan TNC, and ASP.NET MVP Mahesh Mitkari.

Arijit Basu, a Dynamics AX MVP from Kolkata, India, has often seen that it becomes difficult to manage AX Configurations in an implementation. To relieve this pain in one of his implementations, he came up with an AX Configuration Launcher which can be installed on each user’s machine.

The launcher creates two local folders, one for .axc files and other for .url files. This launcher then shows all the files in groups to the user. These two folders can now be remotely updated/ synced by the admin so when new configurations are available, it is dropped into these folders and end users can access them. Also when existing configurations are no longer used, they can be remotely removed from the folders.

In version revisions, Arijit has revamped the user interface, and added the ability to sync from a centralized network share and to configure the application.

Download - AX Configuration Launcher

Jacob Sebastin, a SQL Server MVP from India, was a speaker at PASS 2009 Summit, where he spoke on Creating XML Schema Collections. Jacob’s attendee ribbons, based on attendees’ achievement, involvement and responsibilities with PASS, were a sight for sure!

As he mentions in his event summary, he was excited to be presenting at the Summit for the first time, and also enjoyed handing over signed copies oh his book - The Art Of XSD – SQL Server XML Schema Collections during his session. His session was also attended by Michael Rys, the Lead Program Manager for XML in the Microsoft SQL Server product team at Microsoft.

At the recently concluded Microsoft PDC09, Scott Guthrie announced and showcased Silverlight 4. While it earned all the wows from the attendees, for this weekend, we dig four of many awesome posts on Silverlight by the MVPs.

• Silverlight 3 DataGrid
• Bing Maps Silverlight Control
• Leverage content editor web part to render Silverlight application
• Create a custom web part to render Silverlight application

Big props to Silverlight MVP – Vikram Pendse and SharePoint MVP - Sundar Narasiman.