It’s funny that Forrester’s Boris Evelson recently received a slew of comments from data warehousing and business intelligence pros wondering why they hadn’t included an evaluation of Excel as a business intelligence tool. Boris goes on to explain why Excel doesn’t work as a standalone BI tool.
Here’s my take on the subject:
Like it or not, the most widely used BI tool today is the spreadsheet. If you are a BI or data warehousing manager, you need harbor no illusions that you are gathering and manually entering data into spreadsheet. Furthermore, you need to work with the logic captured in Excel spreadsheets and enable this logic to be used for analysis and decision support.
What’s the problem? Simple. The proliferation of custom-built reports with unstructured data pulled from who-knows-where using self-serving metrics brings into question the value of the information available.
+Rick Sherman
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