Business Intelligence in Excel 2007

A second video released in a day! Keep posting the videos, although  I don't know if I can keep up and watch all of them ! But I'll gladly enjoy that problem rather than not having any videos to watch 

Excel 2007 rocks!!
Thanks Charles...

I wish that I could live in some bubble that would protect me from sample databases like AdventureWorks.  Must be nice.  Can we do count(distinct [field]) in excel 12 pivotTables?

Thanks for posting Channel 9! 

We certainly didn't get to cover everything new in this session, so I hope to record some more footage in the near future.

For more information on Excel 12 (including BI features, Excel Services, and new charting capabilities) check out David Gainer's blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/.

Thanks,
Mike.

It's great to see the simplified Pivot table.

Mike Arcuri has a lot more to discuss. Please bring it on.

Probably not appropriate to discuss partner solutions on Channel 9 but I'd love to see a discussion on how Tableau's data visualizations gel with Excel 12.

Charles. Dang. I can't keep up with all these videos everyday. I guess I'll have to watch the remaining 2 you mentioned over the next few days. Heh.

This excel video was really good! Nice long software demo with Scoble asking good questions. Asking what a pivot table is was great...because while I've thrown the term around alot I now have a much better understanding of what exactly a pivot table is. Thanks Scoble for stepping back and asking questions....your questions and his great explainations really helped me grasp the power of Excel 12.

I loved when you asked what a KPI is? Because I didn't have a clue either.

Thanks for helping us excel laymen understand...

The convert to formula is AWESOME!!! That is a serious innovation in my opinion...


I also love how he built the pivot table with just what 3 clicks....Incredible!

BTW, I liked the C9 guy on the window.

Keep up the great work.  

One of the questions I've always had about MS demos is who builds them. With this video I'd love to meet the team that had to build this demo....its super complex. I'd also love to see a video on the teams that are behind Contoso and Fabricam....the 2 companies that Microsoft uses in most of its demos.

Mike I'd love to have more excel videos like this. I don't use Excel all that much....but this video was a great conversation about the architecture of the functionality in Excel...And if I see more excel videos on C9 I will definitely be using Excel 12/2007! 

I'd love to see a video on building the Dashboard without any code!

This video excites me about Excel in a way I've never been excited about excel ever before(heck I've never been excited about excel before this)!

Zeo, stop posting fanboy crap. You sound like an overexcited 9 year old.

ZippyV, I'll post my honest thoughts on the content here on Channel9. The majority of the content is stellar, but when I see bad content I have no problem being critical.

I've also given lengthy constructive critical  feedback on where I think C9 needs to improve....because I want to see it improve. Which frankly is more than I can say that I've seen from your posting contributions.


I write  code for a living and when I'm not at work I come here to C9 to relax and enjoy the videos....and frankly I can get excited about whatever I want too.  

 Now let's get back to talking about excel 12, ok?

Zeo! You're hired! Don't let the NON-mvp types get you down.  THEY just don't "get" it when it comes to the MVP program.  What's a little excitement between MVPs??!?!

Dr. Ellsonpeter (MVP AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT)

Office 2007 rocks.  Looks like I'm going to be compiling all the traffic from my websites into Excel 2007 just cuz it's so cool - I need some reason to use it.

Looking very very nice.

I am looking forward to see all the changes in the charting...it's the only thing that ever bugged me seriously. 

Sure i know there are a stack of third party charting packages out there but some flexible charting that you can plot up in a report without it looking totally generic would be cool to have....not technical paper quality but somewhere closer would be cool.  Guess being an engineer got me fired up about that.

You put all that work in to getting your data in a good shape...kind of nice if you can present it in a cool way too

One thing that would be marvelous with excel is changing the how cells are ranged. I mean, currently excel has this limit of 64K Rows x 256 Columns, but if i needed only 128 columns, i would then be able to get 128K rows.

Where i work at, we often have to work with data that has many rows. We, as standard users, have no access to the underlying queries and as such, must often run a standard report that returns 100's of thousands of rows. So the 64k limit is really bad. I know this has to do with memory management, but by reselecting how rows and columns are split, i could use the same amount of memory with a limit that makes more sense to me.

I mean, how many times did you have to work with more than 32 columns ? Unless its a full application with protected cells etc. in which case you will probably not need 64K rows. On the other hand, the inverse could be true. One could need more Columns and less rows.

Would be interesting to have feedback on this.

Fantastic video, finally MS brings a good front end for analysis server. I was already playing with Excel 12, however I will have now a look at the Sharepoint integration. Hopefully I can show now a complete migration path to an all MS BI Solution and kick out the old Business Objects stuff.

The only thing I fear is that it might take again ages to convince the company to migrate their office to the latest version
Anyway then it might be time to look for a more innovative company


 

DarkByte wrote:

One thing that would be marvelous with excel is changing the how cells are ranged. I mean, currently excel has this limit of 64K Rows x 256 Columns, but if i needed only 128 columns, i would then be able to get 128K rows.

Yeah, there should be a way to remove the rows and columns limit. A lot of people are complaining about not enough columns. Especially if you want a column for every day of the year (>365 columns).

If you use ODBC to import data into a pivot table you can have millions of rows.  However, you can only display 2^16 rows in Office < 2007.  I use sum, min, max, and count to rollup most of my queries. 

"I'd love to see a video on building the Dashboard without any code!"

Robert ... Let me add my vote as well to get this on video ASAP !!!

ZippyV wrote:

DarkByte wrote: One thing that would be marvelous with excel is changing the how cells are ranged. I mean, currently excel has this limit of 64K Rows x 256 Columns, but if i needed only 128 columns, i would then be able to get 128K rows.

Yeah, there should be a way to remove the rows and columns limit. A lot of people are complaining about not enough columns. Especially if you want a column for every day of the year (>365 columns).

Excel 12 will be able to support 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns.  So you'll be able to have a column for each day over 44 years (if you choose).  You can find out all of the new features on the Official Excel Blog

-=STZ=-

anywhere wrote:

"I'd love to see a video on building the Dashboard without any code!"

Robert ... Let me add my vote as well to get this on video ASAP !!!

Ditto - I would love to see more on the BI Features - it would be good to find out if the "Excel Services" that he talks about is a completely different server product from the onese listed here. 

Also it would would be excellent to find out more details about the "Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007" and "Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007". 

I would also like to echo Zeo's comments to Scoble:  This video was awesome - keep asking the basic questions!  I loved the technical aspects, but you kept it basic enough that I was able to share this video with some of our upper management - who were thrilled at what is coming.  Only problem now is that they keep asking how soon it all is going to be available, and if any pieces of what they saw here were already in the wild.

Awesome stuff!  Keep up the great work - C9 is great!

I do not know about XL12 but, Count distinct is not easy on any olap system that I have found yet...

It would be cool if someone figured out a way to handle it.

P

I'll play the resident village idiot part - where does one actually see how to create a Pivot Table in 2007?

I've been reading a few blogs and so on and everyone starts with it already in view or somehow has Pivot Tables showing up on the ribbon.

I can't see that on my beta version.

Probably staring right at it...one would think it would be either under Data or Review tabs.

Is there a chance of downloading that Mountain Bike spreadsheet in the video to play with?

cheers
Tom

Nice. usefule. Thanks.
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