Business Intelligence Grows in Excel 2013

Excel 2013 continues to be the centerpiece of Microsoft’s growing end user—focused business intelligence (BI) platform, while SQL Server 2012 and SharePoint 2013 deliver improved and more integrated BI features. The focus on end-user BI is intended to enable users to make business decisions without requiring IT throughout the process of analyzing business data. However, deployment of Microsoft’s updated BI platform requires licensing premium editions of Office, SharePoint, and SQL Server. While the technology may help encourage end-user BI, the cost may limit it to larger organizations. Microsoft will be offering new cloud-based BI later in 2013, but the timing and pricing are unclear.

Microsoft End-User BI

Power Pivot (previously spelled PowerPivot), a feature now integrated directly into premium editions of Excel 2013, enables advanced Excel users to interconnect and integrate process large data sets into a single Excel workbook. These data sets (called models) allow users to analyze the data to look for patterns, track business metrics, or perform other BI tasks, which is why Excel is so key to Microsoft’s BI story.