" .... An interview with 27 Excel experts, where they talk about the future of Excel in Business Intelligence. ... " Some good thoughts here. Every enterprise uses Excel, so you can't ignore it as an existing consolidation place for data in the enterprise. So also a place where business intelligence will live. It will take some time to evolve away from this situation. And effort's like Microsoft's Power BI will further slow the change.
(Update) I have added the comments on the interviews of my Excel Expert, Walter Riker below:
....
First of all they all sound like Microsoft Excel Evangelists, which more are and which in not necessarily bad. Great glowing reviews and I enjoyed reading all of them. In the beginning, the second reviewer.said something that I found very profound and important.
"The killer for Excel today is not the fact that it isn’t the best out there for building business intelligence, it is the fact that far too many users are ignorant of the vast amount of capability that was added in the last five years.
The attitude of “Excel can’t do that” is still pervasive and relied upon by its competitors to sell THEIR products."
So true. I find this in my end of the business in which I do not deal with high-end analytic people.
One of the respondents, toward the end, goes where I (and I think you) feel this is all headed.
This is the route I see Excel taking in the future. Truly empowering a user to do amazing in depth analysis without writing a single equal sign (if you know what I mean). Maybe even taking it a step further and anticipating future events by just analyzing data without any human intervention and giving advice to users. So Excel will get a lot smarter and in the process, so will the users, and for this ability only, Excel will probably find its way into countless even non Microsoft applications.
Excel may be used however will we even know that? Will we even know what tools the "Watson" of BI is using?
One of the comments goes into errors of significance with Excel. I have heard so much of this; "The calculation was incorrectly written, you can't trust Excel." In my mind Excel did not produce the error, the analyst did and errors can be created using any tool. We make choices and all we have is analysis in the long run to find the error's and correct them. Very simply put; "The world isn't Flat? Now we have to re-evaluate our routes to India."
Now let me change course, or add a different point of view.
In the years of teaching I do find it funny when I think back over my time with spreadsheets how things have changed. I often mention, in my intro to Excel, that this, Excel, was one of the best gaming tools we had in the 80's (VisiCalc, Super Plan, Muti Plan, Quattro Pro, Lotus 123, and eventually Excel). I attempt to explain that we used these tools to help us foretell the future from historical data. Make projections based on known information ( now called data). I called it "game playing" and I was not the only one. "What if....." was a common term.
Today we collect so much data and the tools have progressed to such a great sophistication that we now refer to these tools as "Power BI" or "Power Business Intelligence". Terminology alone has added a feeling of security. We have provided an "air" of firmness to our results. We have statistical (analytical) tools that, although we are still projecting, we can feel more comfortable with the outcomes based on this analysis. "I mean, how far off can we be?"
In the end, to my way of thinking, we must still remember that we are gaming.
Walter Riker : http://www.curiousvoyager.com/
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