In terms of cloud-based business, don’t rule Microsoft. The company is celebrating a huge user growth milestone complete with new features. Of these, users can now import data from Excel and turn it into live-updating graphs and charts. The changes mark a new course for the company, and just may put them to the top of the data world.
MICROSOFT AND POWER BI GET AN UPGRADE
Microsoft’s Power BI now has more than 5 million subscribers, marking a huge accomplishment for the company. These subscribers use Power BI to take in data and create new dashboards that will help visualize and understand their business. As a standalone product, it’s gotten rave reviews. Now, it’s getting a big upgrade involving Microsoft Excel. Starting soon, subscribers can use an Excel connector to get direct, live-updating data from Excel to a Power BI dashboard.
EXCEL INTEGRATION JUST THE FIRST STEP
In order to help organizations see how their employees use Power BI and Excel’s integration, Microsoft will add a usage feature. This feature will develop reports to show how people are using the various parts of the program. Licensing Power BI costs $10 a month, and people generally like to see how their money spent. In addition to Power BI changes, Microsoft has other news.
VISUALIZE DATA WITH SANDDANCE
Microsoft truly seems enamored with visualizing data lately. Besides the Power BI dashboard, the software company is releasing something called SandDance. This tool will transform data points into a visual, three-dimensional cube graph. Users can get it now in beta for both Windows and Power BI. Its purpose is to get you to look at data in new and interesting ways. Spreadsheets have always been boring but imagine looking where events show up on a map and then stacking sets of data on these locations to show where they occur the most frequently. Data is now simply more than just function, it is becoming an art. No one is doing data like Power BI at the moment. It seems the creator of Windows has now found a new niche in which to dominate.
