Analyze your inbox with PowerPivot

Inspired by an Microsoft Excel add-in where you can analyze your calendar items with Excel’s new PowerPivot tool, I decided to have a look at my inbox with Excel and PowerPivot.

And here is the interesting results.

The model reads all items in my inbox root folder (with currently over 1.800 items – been a while since I read about inbox Zero), and imports subject, sender, sender email address, size of the mail and number of attachments.

This data is inserted into a sheet in the workbook in a table. This table is then linked to PowerPivot window.

And in order to make some date grouping and calculate whether the mail was from a collegaue or external mail, I added some calculated columns in the PowerPivot model.

Based on the PowerPivot model I then created this overview / dashboard of my inbox.

I can see that

• I receive most e-mail on Wednesdays
• About 75 % of my mail is over 1 month old
• 10 senders are responsible for 53 % of my big inbox and 33 % of all mails
• I can see that 51 % percent of the Mb in my mail box comes from my colleagues meaning that they must learn how to insert links to files in their emails instead and we can save a lot of space on our mail server.

And the last interesting thing – my colleagues apparently eat around 12:00 and put their kids to bed at 20:00

If you want to try this on your own inbox, please send me a comment and I will send you the model. (Requires Excel 2010)