Business Intelligence Features in Excel 2010

Friday, January 29, 2010

Business Intelligence Features in Excel 2010

If you're an Excel geek, you can't miss this collection of posts about the new Excel 2010 features on the Office 2010 Engineering blog.
The Excel team has made a number of improvements in the Business Intelligence area for Excel 2010, which have been covered in-depth on the Excel Team Blog.

First, the team added slicers, which are visual controls that allow you to quickly and easily filter your data in an interactive way. Slicers can connect to PivotTables, PivotCharts, and CUBE functions to creative interactive dashboards:

Part of an interactive Dashboard with Slicers and PivotCharts
A number of enhancements have been made to PivotTables- including the ability to modify values in PivotTable cells (writeback), more flexibility and power through named sets, and a series of other enhancements.
A new search filter is available for tables and PivotTables, which allows you to quickly navigate through large data sets.

The New Search Filter
Finally, the Excel and SQL teams have collaborated to create a PowerPivot, a powerful data analysis tool made up of two components: an add-in for Excel 2010 and a series of new features for SharePoint 2010.
"Designed for business users, PowerPivot […] delivers unmatched computational power directly within the application users already know and love — Excel. Leveraging familiar Excel features, users can transform enormous quantities of data from virtually any source with incredible speed into meaningful information to get the answers they need in seconds."