Excel 12 - Surfacing & visualising data

The latest news from the Excel 12 team means I can finally talk about one of my favourite features of the new release - data bars. This is such a simple yet powerful visualisation tool, I know I'm going to be using it a lot. The flexibility which will be afforded us to configure data bars and other visualisations according to user needs is fantastic. More and more I see Office 12 helping BI developers spend less time creating great reports. This gives us more time to work on the back-end stuff with SSIS & SSAS, which I know most developers (including me) enjoy much more.

I recently made a poor attempt at humour with reference to 'surfacing' data. All jokes aside, Office 12 and other stuff coming from Redmond in the near future will give us far greater power to surface and visualise data for end-user consumption. Already with SSAS we can now define visual KPIs, in the Business Scorecard Accelerator (which is the precursor for what will soon be Business Scorecard Manager 2005 a.k.a. Maestro) we also have similar visual KPI functionality. There is more to come, much more.

BTW Ian Tien's unofficial Business Scorecard Manager 2005 blog can be found here. Also, if you're interested in more data about the Office 12 UI Jensen Harris' blog is where to go