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Some days ago, Microsoft released the first public preview of Microsoft Data Explorer for Excel (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36803) as strategy to enforce their Self-Service Business Intelligence strategy beyond PowerPivot and Power View.
To unveil what this new tool brings us, this is the first part of a series of post to discover some of the capabilities of Data Explorer. Let’s begin!
Going back to the Query Pane in Excel, you can notice some options about the data load in the third section: “Enable download” allow to enable or disable the use of the query. “Load to worksheet” indicates Data Explorer if in addition to create the data source query, Excel should download the data to a new Excel sheet. The last option “Load to data model” indicates Data Explorer to download the data to the workbook Power Pivot data model.
As you saw, the new Microsoft Data Explorer Preview for Excel makes honor to its name and description, putting in the hands of the end-user (Information Worker in the Microsoft lingo), a very simple to use and powerful way to discover and obtain new data from local and external sources to enrich our analysis, even from non relational sources such as Wikipedia pages, fast and easy as never before. In the next post we will play with more of one source of data and the merge capabilities.