Why Excel is Better Than You Realize

The Business Intelligence industry is undergoing a silent reformation, find out how Excel is slaying the competition without breaking a sweat.

If it’s time to evaluate your organization's need for specialized reporting tools and a business intelligence (BI) capability, there is a potent secret weapon lying dormant on your desktop right now, and it might just change your perspective about everything.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Everyone’s favorite spreadsheet application of choice turned 30 this year, but Excel certainly hasn’t become grey, aged and frail in it’s senior years. To the contrary, something amazing has happened, and Microsoft has remained suspiciously quiet on the matter.

Akin to a metamorphosis, Excel, the ugly green caterpillar that we have known for years has just emerged from a cocoon, and is about to spread its wings and fly. This evolution in Excel’s native performance and capability has seriously eroded the benefits case that Business Intelligence Tools may have had just a few years ago.

If you are about to take big decisions around your organization's data analytic and business intelligence strategy, we hope that we have got your attention for the moment. Although we could talk at length about all the new technical features that ships with Excel 2016, for the purposes of keeping this piece focused on tactical and strategic business considerations, everything has been chunked into 4 generic areas:

why-etl

Extracting, Transforming and Loading

PowerQuery has flung Excel into the future and with this module we can fetch dirty and unstructured data from any source, define a query, save that query and run it again whenever we need to, simply with one click. A typical example of the inefficient status quo would play out like this: You receive 4 different data extracts, all in different formats, all from different sources, then as an added nuisance you need to manually clean, lookup, link, collate and re-validate this data week after week. Well, this is now a thing of the past, as in one real life scenario, what took a VBA macro 45 minutes to achieve, can be done in PowerQuery in 20 seconds. The result can be further manipulated with multi-dimensional DAX formulaes, allowing you to do some truly incredible transformations on source data. In Prior years this was the main selling point of 3rd party BI tools.
why-data-model

Data Modelling

After you have loaded, clean and rationalized data, here is where the fun starts. We can, in very few clicks of the mouse link data together and build related data models. We can even add dimensions to our data by introducing hierarchy structures. These are all radically new concepts to deal with in the context of Excel. Previous versions of Excel never had that level of data integrity, each worksheet was an isolated standalone data object. Thanks to PowerPivot we are now able to bring everything together and spit out fascinating new views of our data. The data can now be served to users in traditional Pivot Tables, or in interactive dashboards courtesy of Power View, the amazing new presentation layer in Excel, which facilitates drilling up or down and a dynamic time and Geo-location based visual experience of your data.
why-native

Native, it’s all Native

The BI Community has this classic long standing joke:

Question: What is the most used feature in any business intelligence solution?
Answer: It is the Export to Excel button

PowerPivot, PowerQuery, PowerView and PowerMap are now part of the native capability of Excel, no more temperamental and ridiculously technical VBA Macros and no more expensive and uncoordinated BI tools either, its where most employees are comfortable and adept in dealing with data, right there in Excel.

why-forecast

Forecasting

Excel 2016 also sees a fresh new face in their world, the forecasting tool. We will admit this tool is currently a very basic and rudimentary feature, but given the direction and firm commitment Microsoft have the Excel community, this will become a key feature of where the application is going in the near future. If the rate of adoption and development of MS Power BI is anything to go by, Sales and Operations planners who have strong affinity toward Excel will not have to wait too long before they could potentially have a fully-fledged forecasting engine at their disposal.

Strategic Outlook

750 Million

Users

  • Excel currently dwarfs even the largest BI players and with a captive market share of more than 750 million users globally, the step changes we have seen in the latest version will simply bolster this already staggering market position that Excel has carved out for itself.
  • Companies are expected to slow down the investment into 3rd party BI solutions and specialist reporting tools as the gap has been significantly bridged with this major reboot, assimilation and convergence of BI functions in the latest rendition of Excel.
  • Given the meteoric rise to maturity of Excel’s BI capability over just a few short years, and the inclusion of forecasting tools in Excel 2016, the current trajectory of Excel appears as if it will be both penetrating the BI market deeper and also develop more native smart heuristic planning and forecasting capability.
Enterprise and commercial spending priorities will be shifted into 3 broad areas:
Developing in-house data analytic capability through commissioning of personalized training
Human capital investment in the form of data specialists with strong business acumen and advanced Excel capability
Short term contracting with 3rd party Excel Consultants to unlock and emulate Business Intelligence using Excel

Final Thoughts

A new age of desktop data analytics is about to be ushered in and its riveting to say the least. What makes this junction so exciting is the many benefits companies are going to reap in the short to medium term:

  • Lower total cost of ownership as Excel is already licensed as part of the Office Suite.
  • The upskilling process does not start from ground zero, organizations already have Excel capability, so it’s merely adding to that existing base as opposed to building a totally new skill-set. Excel is already a familiar playground for desktop data analysts.
  • The myth has been busted and this myth will continue to unravel in the minds of CIOs; you do not always need specialized reporting systems and 3rd Party Business intelligence tools to produce advanced reporting and Excel is no longer just a basic tool. There is some seriously heavy duty and industrial strength ammo under the hood in Excel 2016 and people are now starting to take it a lot more seriously as those in the know are able to vastly accelerate turnaround of complex data analytics, without needing specialized software.

Talk To Us

If you are reconsidering your BI strategy and want to explore how Excel can save you time, money and help you push out quality reporting faster, call us to for a consultation

Contact Us

To conclude and affirm the findings of this discussion, the sentiment around Excel’s future is unanimous from global experts:

  • With Excel 2010/2013/2016 we can use Excel tools like Power Query to get data from almost anywhere, filter out what we don’t need and clean it before sending it to Power Pivot, where we create relationships between the different data sources, mash them up in PivotTables and present it in amazing, interactive Excel Dashboards. And when you want to update your dashboard you simply press the ‘Refresh All’ button. Job done! Excel is affordable self-service BI for everyone.
    Mynda Treacy
    My Online Training Hub
  • Excel is increasingly becoming a player in the world of Big Data BI. This is good news for the millions of data analysts… For them, Excel is familiar, readily available, and now more powerful than ever.
    Michael Alexander
    Data Pig Technologies
  • Business Intelligence solutions are now readily available to small and medium size enterprises (SME’s) allowing them to gain valuable insights that were once only undertaken by large corporations that could afford such workflows and processes.
    Brian Krisanski
    Excel Super Site
  • The addition and integration of the new Power BI tools within Excel really opens up the possibilities for any type of analyst or everyday user to get involved in Business Intelligence.
    Jon Acampora
    Excel Campus
  • The killer for Excel today is not the fact that it isn’t the best out there for building business intelligence, it is the fact that far too many users are ignorant of the vast amount of capability that was added in the last five years. The attitude of “Excel can’t do that” is still pervasive and relied upon by its competitors to sell THEIR products. I personally see Excel as THE future of Business Intelligence workflows.
    Ken Puls
    Excel Guru
  • I truly believe that Excel is here to stay and it’s going to do everything in its power to become a BI tool as opposed to a support tool for other business intelligence software.
    Brad Edgar
    bradedgar.com

The above testimonials has been cited from this article appearing on https://www.investintech.com

Wesley Jeftha
Wesley Jeftha
Wesley Jeftha is the co-founder of Excel Reporting Services, an Australian based Excel Consulting agency, helping clients build impressive Excel reporting capabilities.

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