Without a doubt, the most accessible tool in use for Business Intelligence today is Microsoft Excel. Excel is by far the most used spreadsheet software in the market place. It is a versatile tool that can be used for data mining, data analytics, automatic charting/reporting … etc.
Here’s the best part – to use Excel and its many fabulous features (including VBA programming) you don’t have to incur any additional cost. Excel comes bundled with the ubiquitous Microsoft Office.
Some people are worried that Excel is falling behind in the Big Data arena where there are other competitive BI tools e.g. Tableau.
Here’s an extract of an article from investingtech.com
“With over 750 million users worldwide, Microsoft Excel is the traditional tool of choice for presenting and analyzing data.
And now, it’s in a position to be the new BI tool of choice, as well. With Excel 2016, Microsoft announced some forward thinking built in Business Intelligence (BI) features. In the age of big data, this is huge.
This announcement, however, raised many questions in the field of big data manipulation. Is Excel powerful enough? Can it manipulate the amount and types of data businesses deal with today? Does Excel have a future in Business Intelligence workflows?
In the search of answers to these questions, we rounded up renowned MS Excel experts and picked their brains on it. We asked them one visionary question:
Where do you see the future of MS Excel in Business Intelligence Workflows?
And here is what they shared with us: …”
Read the full article here.