Instead of trying to cram those options into Excel, or bolting them onto the side, Microsoft is now supporting a much broader set of analysis tools – from the Power BI service, to its purchase of Revolution Analytics and its investment in R, to the way the Excel tools have become their own program. I’ve never met a business analyst who doesn’t use Excel.” But they’ve turned to those other tools as well, because they want to get value out of their data in a different way than they can in Excel. “They’re not replacements for each other. The service only came out of preview in July 2015, and it was already being used by 500,000 users at 45,000 companies in 185 countries (even though it’s only officially available in 145 of those).Įxcel has been a business intelligence service for a long time and hasn’t been losing users directly to tools like Tableau because, Phillips claims, all those Tableau users still use Excel as well. Phillips has overseen the transition of Power BI from a SharePoint feature to a service that he expects to have a billion users. “I want something that allows me to get my work done without being a BI professional.”
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“Business analysts have wanted the self-service BI capability that allows them to not have to stand in line to get their work done, to not have to go get someone else to do measures for them in Cognos or Analysis Services,” says James Phillips, the general manager of data experiences at Microsoft. That’s why Power BI, the cloud service, has a desktop companion app, Power BI Desktop (recently renamed from Power BI Designer), that’s taking over from the complex Excel extras. And when you’ve finished using up to four different tools on top of Excel, what you get needs a complex mix of SharePoint, Silverlight, Excel and HTML5 to share with other users.Ĭompare that to Microsoft’s Power BI service, which is both powerful and easy to use – with new features being added every week – and those complex Excel tools make even less sense. Some relatively simple things (like drawing lines on a map) can get complicated with Excel power tools. Powerful also means complex - very complex compared to self-service analytics solutions like Tableau. You can end up connecting to data and cleaning it in Power Query, analyzing it in Power Pivot and then visualizing it in Power Map and Power View as three or four disconnected steps.
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Even worse, they all have their own interfaces – which look almost, but not quite like Excel – in separate windows. You can connect to, clean, deduplicate and transform almost any data explore and filter millions of rows of data build KPIs and create visualizations.Įven though you use Excel to build the data model that you’re going to analyze, the tools you do that analysis with aren’t part of the Excel interface.
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Instead, the new analysis and visualization tools that turn Excel into a hugely business intelligence (BI) platform arrived as add-ons –available only if you have a separately installed Office ProPlus license (or an Office 365 E3 tenant) - that live on their tabs in the Excel ribbon, but launch separate apps.Įxcel formulas and pivot tables might arguably be the most popular programming language in the world and these new tools – Power Query, Power Pivot, Power Map and Power View – are even more powerful.
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In recent years, some of the most significant improvements to Microsoft Excel haven't been part of the familiar spreadsheet software directly.