Microsoft Excel and Business Intelligence
Microsoft Excel® is the most popular tool of choice for collecting, analyzing, formatting and arranging tabular data.
Excel has superior calculation and formatting capabilities over most existing spreadsheets and along with its ability to accept actual code (Visual Basic) to create macros and business logic – it quickly became a custom Business Intelligence tool of choice for many users/organizations that cannot afford enterprise Business Intelligence solutions.
However, using Excel as dashboard software, reporting software or any other Business Intelligence application has significant disadvantages:
- Collecting data is too complex. You need to be a programmer to utilize most of the
generic data collection capabilities of Excel.
- Never-ending cell shifting and range manipulation. When new data comes in, you must spend a significant amount of time rearranging cells and manipulating ranges in
order
for your charts and pivots to reflect the new data.
- Poor performance over modest data volumes. Excel performs very sluggishly when it is asked to handle over a few tens of thousands of rows.
- Limited data volumes. Excel 2003 is limited to roughly 65,000 rows. Excel 2007 pushed up this limit to a million.
- Mediocre analytic capabilities. In comparison to true Business Intelligence tools,
Excel’s analytic capabilities are very basic and limited to trivial
(and often not very useful) field filters.
SiSense Prism and Microsoft Excel
SiSense Prism is a powerful, innovative, do it yourself productivity software for building, sharing and using Business Intelligence applications that solve common, information-driven business problems. It works together with Excel to provide a robust solution for collecting, analyzing and visualizing data.