Business Intelligence For The Excel User
December 6, 2013
Microsoft Office Suite might not the same heavy-lifting data discovery solutions as specially designed software, but Database Journal reports in the article “Getting Started With Microsoft Power Query For Excel” that an equivalent solution is available. Power Query is a Microsoft Power BI Excel add-in that provides data discovery, data reshaping, and data combination from multiple sources. Power Query’s user interface is both interactive and intuitive and can be used for a variety of basic yet powerful functions: search, discover, acquire, combine, refine, transform and enrich the data.
The article explains how to download Power Query and covers elementary procedures to program it to your specific needs:
“Power Query (code name for this feature was “Data Explorer”) is a free Excel add-in (supported both in Excel 2010 and Excel 2013) which can be installed from the ‘Download Microsoft Power Query for Excel page. To install the Power Query add-in, you require Microsoft Office 2013 Professional Plus, Office 365 ProPlus, Excel 2013 Standalone or Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus with Software Assurance. You can find more information on this under the Software Requirements section of Microsoft Power Query for Excel.”
In a way, Power Query is a mini-big data machine in Excel. Microsoft may want to trademark that idea. Excel is the basis for most data storage and collection in organizations. Viable business intelligence solutions usually do not come this cheap and it is worth investigating to make use of data sitting on a server.
Whitney Grace, December 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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