Last week, Excel 2013 Preview, SharePoint 2013 Preview and SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 Community Technology Preview 3 (SP1 CTP3) became available for customers to download. This release comes on the heels of SQL Server 2012, released just a few months ago, which delivered a major set of Business Intelligence capabilities for all users with Power View, as a leading new end user visualization tool. The SQL Server 2012 release enables end users to unlock new insights with data discovery across their organization while providing IT the necessary visibility and oversight to deliver credible, consistent data.
This release of Excel enables business users to do self-service Business Intelligence directly in the client, which now becomes a complete and powerful self-service BI tool – users have all they need in one familiar application in order to do data modeling, exploration and visualization of the data.
Also, SharePoint 2013 supports corporate deployments and significantly improves governance and compliance over the self-service BI assets. SQL Server 2012 SP1 is required for server side compatibility.
Our innovation over the last few years has not gone unnoticed – Forrester Research, in the latest wave covering self-service BI (The Forrester WaveTM: Self-Service Business Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2012″), has identified Microsoft as a leader and asserted that “Microsoft enables business users to look no further than Excel for self-service BI”. You can read more about this in our recent blog post.
With these significant investments in Excel and SharePoint 2013 self-service BI becomes a natural part of user’s day-to-day activities. See below for more details!
New capabilities delivered for end users in Excel 2013:
- Ability to analyze data ranging from a few rows to hundreds of millions of rows with extreme analytical performance on your desktop using Excel data models powered by xVelocity in-memory analytics engine
- Opportunity to speed up analysis in Excel by easily cleaning up and shaping your data with Flash Fill; by previewing, applying conditional formatting, creating tables, charts and PivotTables using Quick Analysis; by easily navigating multidimensional and tabular data models and creating trend charts to analyze information over time using Quick Explore.
Quick Explore enables a user to look at the product categories summarized by Sales Quantity with 1 click:
Quick Analysis suggests a Pivot Table type with a preview of actual data:
- Empower users of all levels to access, mash-up and analyze data from virtually any source and rapidly create compelling analytical applications with PowerPivot. Click here to learn more about new features in PowerPivot in Excel 2013
PowerPivot Diagram View shows the data relationship:
- Provide stunning data visualization to discover new insights at the speed of thought with a highly interactive and familiar data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience for users of all levels with Power View. Click hereto learn more about new features in Power View in Excel 2013
Interactive visualization with Power View in Excel 2013:
New capabilities delivered for IT:
At the same time, we are strengthening our IT management and oversight capability by
- Enabling discovery and assessment of user-created spreadsheets with SharePoint 2013
- Enabling comparing spreadsheets, tracking lineage, conducting interactive diagnostics and creating spreadsheet analysis reports with Inquire in Excel
SharePoint 2013 discovery and assessment criteria setup:
Inquire in Excel showing spreadsheet lineage and workbook analysis:
