Excel 2010 - Just another spreadsheet or is it finally a serious BI contender?

With the introduction of Excel 2010 and all the hype around its new PowerPivot plug-in

, has Microsoft finally nailed the end user BI market? From the industry posts that I have seen on the net, it is certainly sending shock-waves through the BI industry and rightly so in my experience.

How many times have you seen businesses spending a small fortune implementing a BI solution from one of the dominant players like Business Objects, only to fall at the first hurdle with low user adoption rates and the familiar cry of "Just give it to me in Excel!"? Most users want to use Excel for data manipulation and reporting (http://www.xl-dbquery.com) and most users are more than comfortable with Excel and the functionality it offers. IT on the other hand has always viewed Excel as the "spawn of the devil", as it encourages "Shadow IT" and is a SOX compliance nightmare (apparently!). According to Microsoft, PowerPivot attempts to address all these issues, so maybe IT will finally have to eat some humble pie and review their opinions of Excel with the arrival of Microsoft's latest offering?

Microsoft has a site dedicated to all things PowerPivot which explains the new tools functionality in detail as well as providing an opportunity for Excel 2010 users to download it (http://www.powerpivot.com/). Best of all its FREE.

And before you ask, no I don't work for Microsoft, I just share the opinion that Excel has always been a more than capable BI end user tool, that is streets ahead of the competion in terms of cost, functionality, user adoption and productivity and with the introduction of Excel 2010 along side PowerPivot, this has only galvanised that view.

Excel 2010 - Just another spreadsheet or is it finally a serious BI contender?

By: Kev Edwards

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