“Excel: Great hammer, lousy screwdriver’”
When evaluating BI tools, many of our customers are hit by marketing messages about the limitations and woes of Excel. One white paper we were pointed to is Tableau’s ‘Excel: Great hammer, lousy screwdriver’. It contains 5 key points concerning Excel limitations for BI which we’ll take a look at over the next few weeks, along with a few others which we hear frequently.
“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”
We fully appreciate that Excel isn’t perfect for all needs, but XLCubed chooses to address the weaknesses and embrace the very significant strengths, rather than throwing everything away.
XLCubed helps users get most value and benefit from Microsoft’s Analysis Services platform by taking the best of Excel, and extending that with an optimised query and reporting environment which lets them do more, and do it more quickly. Excel becomes a very flexible presentation layer, and Analysis Services removes the scalability and data integrity issues.
Let’s take a look at some of the key Excel objections raised, with #2 to follow next week:
#1) Limited data volumes
“Excel only handles 1 million rows – that’s not nearly enough for my business”
The advent of Big data makes everyone think of huge data volumes. In reality if you’re looking at core Financial reporting a million rows may well be more than enough but that’s not the point: for sales and operational reporting over several years a million rows won’t come close. Big Data is partly around volumes, but also concerns the data structure. These days the challenge of big data isn’t the ability to store it, it’s the ability to do something useful with it. And doing something useful with it isn’t creating reports which run to a million rows.
We see Excel as a presentation layer, not as a database. While Power Pivot muddies that argument a little, very few people see Power Pivot models as a central repository for Corporate data. XLCubed is a client front end tool for SQL Server Analysis Services (which laughs at 1 million rows). 1 million new rows per day over several years is starting to ramp up the volume, but the technology is designed to scale, and to scale on significantly less expensive hardware than in-memory technologies (of which Analysis Services 2012 of course now has its own player with xVelocity).
So while Excel and hence XLCubed can only display 1 million rows at a time, the underlying cubes can run to billions of rows. XLCubed gives the user flexible and fast filtering and ranking capabilities, simple ways to leverage the cube hierarchies, and effective data visualisation techniques to let you work with these large volumes of data.
Aside from that, if someone wants a report (a report!) which is a million rows long, our first question is always ‘and can you show me how you use that report?’. If you print it you’ll get around 25,000 pages of deforestation. By comparison Tolstoy’s War and Peace is around 1,400 pages in most print editions… We believe there is a lot to be said for a combination of top-down reporting, and ranking and filtering to make that type of data volume useful rather than burdensome.
So in summary, when you’re using XLCubed and the Microsoft BI stack, more than a million rows of data is really not a limitation (though if you put a million rows in the report you’re creating your own limitation in terms of its usefulness).
