Software developers dream of one day unseating Microsoft Excel, the king of spreadsheets. A long line of rivals have come and gone in this quest. The shift to cloud software has only increased the number of hopefuls.
Microsoft has fought back by adding business intelligence features common to dedicated BI apps. A survey of 27 experts in Microsoft Excel, carried out by a software company that makes PDF to Excel export software, listed the reasons why the program will be around for a long while yet.
Canadian Excel guru Ken Puls (quoted in the survey) summed it up well.
With the increasingly diverse toolset being added to Excel — Power Query to source and clean data from disparate dirty sources, Power Pivot to aggregate those disparate sources into business intelligence models, Power View to create dynamic dashboards from those models and Power Map to tell the data story on a geo-spatial plane – it’s very clear that Microsoft is investing heavily to make Excel the Business Intelligence tool of choice.
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