Modelon Solutions

Happy new years everyone, I hope each of you will find what they desire this year !

One of the first things I would like to do is thank Microsoft for selecting me as a MVP for the 2015 year ! I love sharing what I learn, and being recognised by Microsoft for this gives me the extra tools and support to make sure I can have a small impact on your lives ! Thanks MS and all of my fellow MVP collegues !

Now to Excel…

On New Years eve, we ended up hosting quite a bit of people and a few I hadn’t seen in a while… who in the previous year had changed jobs in order to get to new challenges. One was describing how he would help companies achieve compliance to some random specs and we then spoke about the process he would use to get there. On the topics of tools, I went on to speak about Excel and how it had saved my life a many times in unleashing the data that was in solutions I had designed for some of my clients.

After taking a few minutes over breakfast this morning to show him what exactly I was talking about, the only word he could say was : wow, this would cost millions with other tools and all you need is Excel and some of those fancy Power* tools to get the job done. Obviously, it is never that easy and we should not overlook the complexities of such projects, but I do believe that the latest Excel has something that must be examined by solutions architects. Let me recap !

PowerPivot – This is the bigger brother of Excel’s pivot tables. Calculations occur in memory and hence let you design calculations, kpis and more !

PowerView – This is a report viewer for Excel, instead of having worksheets where we hide the cells to show some graphs, we get something much better

PowerMap – I haven’t played much with this one, but let’s you tell a story based on time and map… I will have to come back in another blog for this one.

PowerQuery – This is where all of the magic occurs. Data doesn’t need to be just in your Excel worksheets, you should be able to grab data from anywhere you want, the web, your databases, a csv file, a odata feed… PowerQuery then lets you record the steps required to clean and transform your data into something usable by Excel, or any of the other Power* tools.

PowerBI – This is another one I haven’t played with too much, but in a nutshell, it’s a portal that can host your Excel files and make the data in them visible by anyone (authorised) with a web browser…

Using these tools, you can go from created canned reports for your users, to giving them the tools so they are empowered and get to what they need. By the way, this is what the industry calls “Self service analytics”. Happy reading !