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Saturday, December 16, 2017

Microsoft: from Excel, to BI, to Advanced Analytics?

Excel is a legitimate starting place, that is used by many if not most enterprises.  So can it be a reasonable path for industry, when linked to right resources?   Good thoughts in linked piece.

Microsoft BI: From Excel to Power BI
Posted by Ravi Madhavan

Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence software ranks Microsoft as the Leader. Here's how their Power BI solution emerged as the evolution of Excel, along with some clarity on the various components and product names which Microsoft has been using. 

In 1985, Madonna was everywhere- on the radio, in the movies, and inside record stores on that new disruptive technology called compact discs. Back to the Future was the biggest movie of the year. Each Thursday night nearly 30 million households spent the evening watching the Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers and Night Court. It was also the year a ten-year-old Microsoft introduced a humble little program called Excel to the world. The story of Microsoft's rise to the top of the Business Intelligence software game with their Power BI product begins with Excel.

If there were a Mount Rushmore for software, Excel would make the cut. Of course, the real Mount Rushmore is a monument for past great, long dead presidents. So one may think BI, Big Data and Analytics would have made Excel little more than a flashback to the 80's and 90's. Think again. Estimates for total Excel users worldwide range from 400 to 750 million. Almost every organization around the globe still does some portion of their data analysis on Excel. It's fair to say even companies providing the most advanced BI and Analytics tools today still probably use Excel internally, although they may not want to mention it. ..... "

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