Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Excel
With Microsoft’s new PowerPivot capabilities, and spreadsheet user interfaces to data sets in Hadoop by IBM BigSheets and Datameer, spreadsheets are more viable than ever as an analytics and business intelligence (BI) tool, to the consternation of some BI program managers.
At Gartner BI Summit 2010, in April in Las Vegas, Gartner advised BI advocates to give up trying to wean business users off Excel, and instead accept that Excel is here to stay. Sri Vemparala, manager of reporting and BI at Stanford University, told Craig Stedman at TechTarget “No matter what we try to do, I don’t think we can get away from Excel.” Gartner analyst John Hagerty advises IT departments to follow a rapid-iteration model to create and update reports, and allow business users to decide how to deploy data, whether in BI software interfaces, dashboards, Excel, SharePoint or other collaboration tools.
