Microsoft® Business Intelligence For Dummies®

Chapter 9. Excel — Digital Data Power to the People

In This Chapter

• Understanding Excel's popularity

• Creating data

• Gathering data

• Organizing data

• Visualizing data with charts and graphs

• Using pivot tables and pivot charts to analyze data

• Data mining with Excel

• Tallying the score with the scorecard

• Understanding the limits of Excel

• Peering in to the future of Excel

You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.

—Warren Buffett

In case you've been hiding under a rock and haven't encountered Microsoft Excel, it's not only a spreadsheet, but one of the most versatile and widely used software applications of all time. Excel is used by a broad spectrum of people — from Grandma keeping track of her sewing materials to multi-billion dollar international corporations forecasting profits and losses. For a vast number of companies small and large, across many industries, Excel is at the heart of the organization.

Excel is unique because its uses span the entire data lifecycle — data generation, data collection, data organization, data visualization, data analysis, and data mining (for more about these stages, see the mini-table in the next section and check out Chapter 2). This versatility makes Excel a one-stop shop for business intelligence (BI), and widely popular as a tool for extracting not only data but metadata (information about data).

Note

The six stages of the data lifecycle — and (for that matter) business intelligence ...