What Are The Big Changes In Excel 2013 For BI?

Reposted from Chris Webb's blog with the authors permission.

As you may already have read, the first public preview for Office 2013 is now available and there’s lots of new BI functionality in there – see here for an overview. Here’s a quick summary of what the two really important changes are:

• PowerPivot has been integrated into Excel, kind of. This means that the xVelocity (aka Vertipaq) engine is now native to Excel, and you can do all the basic PowerPivot stuff like loading vast amounts of data from multiple data sources and querying it via PivotTables directly in Excel, without installing any extra addins. PowerPivot does still exist as an optional extra however: you need it if you want to use the more advanced functionality that exists in PowerPivot today, such as filtering data before import, using diagram view, defining hierarchies and perspectives and so on.
• Power View has also been integrated into Excel: Power View reports become a new type of sheet inside a workbook, and you can use it against data held in the integrated xVelocity/PowerPivot engine; I’m not clear yet whether it will work on a SSAS 2012 Tabular model (and at some point a SSAS Multidimensional model, once support for DAX on Multidimensional models arrives) but I hope it does. No more need to moan about Power View being tied to Sharepoint!

There are a whole bunch of other BI-related changes in Excel which I’ll try to summarise in another post soon (stuff like the suggestions for charts and PivotTables, flash fill, timeline slicer). However I think that the two changes above represent a master-stroke on the part of Microsoft: they make Excel 2013 a serious contender in the self-service BI tool stakes. Certainly, other vendors will be quick to point out the features they have and that Excel doesn’t, and dedicated BI vendors will always be able to add new features faster and more frequently than Excel, but that’s not the point. It won’t happen overnight but at some point every company will upgrade to Office 2013 and when they do, all users will have a BI tool on their desktops which is vastly more capable than Excel today and will be good enough for the majority of BI scenarios – which means that the need to even look at third party tools will disappear.

UPDATE A few clarifications:

• The PowerPivot addin, while still an addin, comes bundled with Excel – there’s no separate download
• As the comments below show, and I can confirm, Power View does work with SSAS 2012 Tabular models

I’ll be posting more details throughout the day on Twitter as I play with the new preview, and will post something more substantial here later

Chris has been working with Microsoft BI tools since he started using beta 3 of OLAP Services back in the late 90s. Since then he has worked with Analysis Services in a number of roles (including three years spent with Microsoft Consulting Services) and he is now an independent consultant specialising in complex MDX, Analysis Services cube design and Analysis Services query performance problems. His company website can be found at http://www.crossjoin.co.uk and his blog can be found at http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com .