Some new Excel BI features in Office 2013

December 17th, 2012 by Stephen Jones Leave a reply »

The inital public preview for Office 2013 is  available with lots of BI functionality.

Two key points that stake out Excel’s claim to be  the BI tool of choice:

  • PowerPivot is closer integrated into Excel, i.e the xVelocity (aka Vertipaq) engine is now native to Excel, and you load vast amounts of data from multiple data sources and query it via PivotTables directly in Excel, without installing any extra addins. PowerPivot still exists as an optional extra  to use the more advanced functionality  such as: filtering data before import, using diagram view, defining hierarchies and perspectives.
  • Power View is also  integrated into Excel so that Power View reports are a new type of sheet inside a workbook, that you  use against data held in the integrated xVelocity/PowerPivot engine. So Power View is no longer  tied to Sharepoint!
  • Anotherlitlte mentoned Excel beta add in is  GeoFlow for geospatial analysis that is closely integrated with PowerPivot see:

    Jen Underwood’s blog post:
    http://www.jenunderwood.com/blog.htm#PASSandSPC2012
    …and, this very detailed post from Patrick Guimonet (in French), which has a lot of screenshots and several long videos shot during the Sharepoint Conference:
    http://blogs.codes-sources.com/patricg/archive/2012/11/16/spc12-spc258-geoflow-for-excel-2013-a-new-way-of-exploring-geospatial-data-and-sharing-insights.aspx

    If you thought maps in Power View were impressive, just check this out…

    (Credit: abstracted from Chris Webb’s BI blog)

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