New Business Intelligence Features for Office 2013

After exploring quite a bit the preview version of Office 2013 it is exciting to see the nice features coming which are closely integrated with the Business Intelligence.

The office 2013 excel looks great, apart from the look and feel which I liked. There are a lot of things to explore in terms of Business Intelligence.

Some of the key features I have described below

1.     The xvelocity (aka Vertipaque) in memory database is now integrated with excel 2013. The Power Pivot comes bundled with the Excel 2013 but it is not enabled by default. In order to use the enable the PowerPivot the steps are mentioned here in detail.

Integrating xVelocity simply means adding more power in Excel and I am sure users end users will like it as now they will have the ability to pull the large amount of data, defining the relationships, creating their own data model and designing the interactive dashboards.

There are some enhancements done in the Power Pivot with in excel 2013

a)      TimeLine feature in addition to “Slicer” functionality which we already have.

b)      We can now integrate the multiple pivot tables and can create a model out of that.

c)       Ability to mash several chart types.

I believe adding these features will help excel coming out of from the tag of “ad hoc tool” for  analysis and will be able to do a lot more than this.

2.     Another important integration is done by providing the ability to create a sheet using “Power View”. We can go to the insert Tab and click on the Power View button to do so. The most important thing is now Power View supports the maps as well.  We can easily import the spatial data and display the interactive maps in excel.

                                   

3.     Office 2013 is now can connect to the Windows Azure Market place. This means we can now import the data hosted on Data Market. This seems to be very important feature with respect to cloud by providing ability to pull the data in excel hosted on cloud.