Last week Office 2013 Preview was released to the public, up until now we have been pretty quiet but expect things to change starting now. Excel 2013 now includes a lot of the SQL Server BI components direct in the OFfice box. This is a very big steps for us at the Microsoft BI team, our tools will become available for everyone that installs Excel. With 2013 Excel now includes:
- The xVelocity in-memory analytics engine, when you now import multiple tables in Excel this will now automatically be pushed to our engine. In Excel this is called the Excel data model. This is fully accessible by the Excel OM (very cool).
- The PowerPivot add-in is now by default installed together with Excel. All you need to do is enable it in the options. There are a few new features in there like Categorizations and new datamarket integration. More on those later.
- Pover View has now also become an add-in in Excel so you can now work with Power View offline in Excel, it can be either connected to the Excel data model or to an external Analysis services instance. Power View also supports some new visualizations like charts, pie charts, themes and more.
In the next couple of days expect some blog posts that highlight some of the hidden nuggets in Excel .
If you want to play with it yourself, download Office Professional Plus 2013 Preview here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=256624
Some links that cover more news:
- Announcing Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Community Technology Preview 3 (CTP3)
- Microsoft Business Intelligence in Excel 2013, SharePoint 2013 and SQL Server 2012 SP1
Really looking forward to seeing this in action. Sounds like a huge game changer. Can’t wait for our clients to take advantage of this.
Nice work by those at Microsoft.
Christopher
Excel and Access, LLC