Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Business Intelligence

Some of you may have seen earlier today that Microsoft announced an investment in Business Intelligence across the Microsoft Office System with Excel 12 at the hub.  You can watch the presentation and demo here.

I have talked already about some of the Excel 12 features that support this investment, and I will be talking a lot more about others over the next few months.  Specifically, over the next few weeks I will talk about:

  • New work we have done to make working with tables a much better experience
  • All-new “Excel Services” server technology that enables sharing, controlling, and re-using Excel workbooks on servers
  • Improvements we have made to PivotTables
  • New formulas that retrieve data from SQL Server Analysis Services
Published Monday, October 24, 2005 5:53 PM by David Gainer

Comments

# re: Business Intelligence

Monday, October 24, 2005 11:53 PM by simon murphy
David
I'm looking forward to the Analysis Services stuff, but does this mean you have finished formula building improvements?
I was hoping you might mention new functionality around creating User Defined Functions (in worksheets?)
Q: will there be a way to define a complex worksheet function once, and reuse that definition many times without resorting to VBA or another programming language?
cheers
Simon

# re: Business Intelligence

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 12:01 AM by Harlan Grove
The SQL Server Analytical Services functions would necessarily be irrelevant to anyone working for a company that uses databases other than SQL Server.

Does the focus on SQL Server and the presumably intentional omission of XLODBC.XLA/SQL.REQUEST from XL11 mean that XL12, like XL11, will come without any means of pulling data from generic (i.e., possibly non-Microsoft) ODBC data sources other than rolling your own wrapper udfs around ADO in VBA?

# re: Business Intelligence

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 2:58 AM by Ted
The presentation link doesn't seem to be working. It says the recording ID or Password may be incorrect.

# re: Business Intelligence

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 8:40 AM by Orion Adrian
I too am interested in seeing advancements in User-Defined Functions and the VBA scripting area in general. I'd love to see at a minimum it get scrollwheel support. I think it's rather rediculous that we're expected to work in it, when it's been essenially forgotten. The major improvement I'd like to see however in that realm is being able to write .Net UDFs. There have been many instances where I'd like some functionality that .Net provides in my Excel workbook from a business intelligence model. Web Service data retrieval and such.

Somewhere deep down I hope someone at Microsoft is working on bringing the Office object model into the .Net world. But I know if you are, you couldn't tell me about it.

# re: Business Intelligence

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 10:06 AM by Tianwei
Can't wait to see the pivot table improvements! When can we add the cumulative percentage (run total of x divided by run total of y) as a Show Option. This is a heavily needed data option but have to create outside pivottable today.

# re: Business Intelligence

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 11:36 AM by John Greenan
Does "Excel Services" mean Excel running on a server? We've spent a lot of time and effort on getting Excel to work on a server in a sensible way and it'd be great to throw all that code away and go to a production quality microsoft codebase (genuinely, lots of really kludgy win32 api calls and a ton of monitoring to see if Excel is still working).

I'll know you'll get to it, but I am on tenterhooks here!

# re: Business Intelligence

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 3:38 PM by simon murphy
Orion
You can write .net worksheet functions now (.net 2003 excel xp or 2003) using a class library project. You just register for COM interop and include a couple of registry functions.
The following books have full info:
.net development for office by Andrew Whitechapel
visual studio tools for office Eric Carter and Eric Lippert.
both very recommended
There are also full instructions including a basic class on our site:
www.codematic.net - look on the visual studio page.
I agree on the VBIDE, I hope its not going to be overlooked just to make VSTO/VSTA look better.
cheers
Simon

# re: Business Intelligence

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 3:55 PM by David Gainer
Howdy,

Simon – No news on UDFs without writing VBA this release. Please feel free to send me your thoughts on what you would like to see (scenarios, capabilities) in future versions. Thanks for the pointers for Orion.

Harlan – The SQL AS functions work against SQL Server Analysis Services, correct, but let me clarify that the data can come from non-SQL Server databases. SQL Server Analysis Services is a technology that lets end users view and analyze large volumes of data (there are a number of benefits that you get from using SQL AS – exposing friendly business terminology not database field names; fast performance; data is enriched with business logic like fiscal vs. calendar date or the company structure; and a single view on an enterprise’s data). The data, however, can come from a variety of different databases - Oracle, DB2, Teradata , Jet, etc. – so strictly speaking, many customers will use SQL AS functions to get to data that is ultimately stored in non-SQL Server relational databases.

Ted – I have made the appropriate folks aware and hopefully it will be working again soon.

Tianwei – More information coming soon.

John – Yes, you can think of Excel Services in that manner; much more detail coming soon.

# re: Business Intelligence

Thursday, October 27, 2005 1:17 AM by David Gainer
Ted - Demo link fixed and working now.

# Excel Services – Key Scenarios

Monday, February 20, 2006 12:45 PM by Microsoft Excel 12
We targeted three scenarios for this initial release of the product (note – “scenario” is development-team...

# Microsoft Excel Business Intelligence | Paid Surveys

Thursday, May 28, 2009 7:13 PM by Microsoft Excel Business Intelligence | Paid Surveys

PingBack from http://paidsurveyshub.info/story.php?title=microsoft-excel-business-intelligence

New Comments to this post are disabled
 
Page view tracker