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Excel 2007 not an 'instant fix' for Microsoft BI strategy - XL Cubed

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25th Jan 2007
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Mike Stephens, CEO of Excel reporting tools developer XL Cubed, has been watching the recent AccountingWEB debate about upgrading to Excel 2007 with great interest.

The company is based on the idea that users like Excel and that it is an ideal front end to let people interact with online analytical data cubes. Stephens acknowledged that Excel 2007 represents a "paradigm shift" and that a lot of what Microsoft is doing is designed to use Excel to expand its position in the business intelligence (BI) marketplace.

"Clearly Microsoft has tremendous influence in this market," Stephens told AccountingWEB. "They've got a good architure now, but when it hits the streets, it's not very coherent. Even in Excel 2007, its still not there."

"We have around 350 customers in the UK and what we're hearing from them is that they haven't finished rolling out XL Cubed for Excel 2003 yet. The whole 2007 environment for Excel on the desktop is a big pradigm shift. It's a different marketplace from when Microsoft put out Windows XP and Office 2003. Customers are taking a hard look at the value they'll get out of [Excel 2007] and asking, 'Is there anything that will require us to do this?'"

With customers running hundreds and even tens of thousands of desktops, the migration to Excel 2007 BI tools is not going to be an overnight thing. "This is going to take years," he said.

In addition to the new ribbon user interface, Microsoft has made some pivot table improvements to better support BI. "Excel 2007 has wrapped some nice menus and wizardy around pivot tables, because users had trouble understanding them. In the way that Excel is presented, that is what gives you multidimensional analysis. But it's not true, multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP)," Stephens said.

To illustrate his point about coherence, Stephens said than anyone wanting to publish Excel-based multidimensional reports, dashboards and KPIs via the web within the Microsoft architecture would mean implementing Microsoft's Balanced Scorecard Manager, SQL Server Reporting Services and SharePoint Server, potentially within the PerformancePoint Server suite that is being launched this year.

"We do that all inside of Excel and people do not have to implement a huge enviroment to do it," he said.

The power of XL Cubed comes from linking Micrsoft's spreadsheet system into the Analysis Services module within Microsoft SQL Server, which gives the company the ability to construct spreadsheet reports and scorecards that can be updated from the underlying data mart.

Like a more sophisticated version of Excel's pivot table Layout wizard, XL Cubed lets you drag and drop dimensions interactively on your worksheet, and double clicking on a summary cell (indicated by a +) will drill down to the next level in the reporting hierarchy. "The ability to go down to different levels of granularity on a multidimensional basis is the key thing XL Cubed offers," said Stephens. "You don't get that in standard Excel."

According to Stephens, XL Cubed extends beyond pivot tables into true multidimensional reporting. "We don't think the feature function set you'll find in Excel will do it yet. They've got to cement the need of a very broad community o Excel users. We're a subset - and I don't think Microsoft is planning to deliver the functions we do," he said.

Rather than wait to implement Microsoft's Excel 2007 Web Services, XL Cubed added the ability to publish reports to the web in version 3.0, released last year. XL Cubed created its own web-based worksheet environment which mirrors the functions of its Excel-based interface (with the exception of some more sophisticated formulae and any VBA routines).

In contrast to the costs and complexity of the pure Microsoft BI environment, Stephens noted that XL Cubed costs $495 for the Excel-based version, or $1995 for a web-based edition capable of serving several users.

Having questioned the BI capabilities of Excel 2007, Stephens insisted that XL Cubed was "happy and excited about what we see" in the new version. The company's developers are already working on a version of XL Cubed to take advantage of Excel 2007 and to incorporate the XL Cubed add-in to the new ribbon interface.

"The current version of XL Cubed will work with Excel 2007, but doesn't take full advantage of the grapical interface," Stephens said. "We want to write a very specific 2007 version and expand it from where Microsoft has taken it. We believe we've got time to do it."

XL Cubed - click for more information via the company's ExcelZone information page.

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