MS Excel enables business users to do self-service Business Intelligence directly on client’s machines. Users using MS Excel tools have all they need in one familiar application in order to model, explore and visualize their data. But, people often have questions on whether companies can really on Excel for their entire Enterprise BI solution. We would use a few analogies in this paper to rationalize the debate, in an effort to steer this discussion more towards the "need" being fulfilled, than the "tool" being used.

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‘MS Excel’ vs. ‘Enterprise BI’: Why the “Either” “OR”
mentality doesn’t work.
Published: November 28, 2012 - Fru Louis
ne of the hot topics folks and leaders in the Business Intelligence industries
are dealing with these days is defining the role of MS Excel in the Business
Intelligence landscape. More frequently
than not, the discussion often boils to
deciding whether to use MS Excel as the
main tool for BI, or whether a more robust
Enterprise BI software (e.g. SAS, Cognos,
SAP, QlikView) should be used.
While the specific criteria for deciding which route to take may vary
from company to company, or industry to industry, I feel that asking the question
of using “EITHER” MS Excel “OR” some other Enterprise BI tool for Business
Intelligence is not only misleading – it completely misses the point. To see why,
we’ll look at some analogies.
An ax cuts, but it’s not the most effective tool to cut cheese. A kitchen knife cuts,
but it’s not the most effect tool to cut a tree in the forest. So in doing any cutting
job, it suffices to find the tool(s) that best meet the needs of the job. Same
reasoning applies in the IT world – Business Intelligence to be specific. In most
companies, the bottom line is that data needs to be massaged and understood,
Business Users and Executives need to make decisions, and IT folks need not feel
like they are spinning-wheels with an ineffective technology.
Whatever tool is the most effective in getting a job done should be
implemented and getting stuck in an “EITHER OR” mentality would be akin to
sticking to a habit of using an ax to cut cheese on your kitchen table or using a
kitchen knife to cut down trees in the forest – doing this would not only be
ineffective, it would be plain silly and even dangerous.
MS Excel has proven to be good at small in-your-face massage of data, and that
is what it should be used for. Trying to use it for anything more than that would
be akin to taking a kitchen knife to cut down a tree in the forest – you certainly
don’t want that. On the other hand, more robust tools such as SAS, Cognos, and
QlikView have proven to be more reliable for heavy-weight ETL and data
manipulation. Using them for anything less than that would be akin to cutting
cheese with an ax – again, you certainly don’t want that.
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Let’s look at another analogy between cars and airplanes to see how the
question of MS Excel vs. Enterprise BI plays out again. Both of them, cars and
airplanes are used for locomotion. If you want to travel on land1, they both
would get you from point A to point B. Now as an example, imagine that you
have a goal of getting from your house in New York (NY) to Los Angeles (LA).
To accomplish this, one thing you might do is use only your car to drive from NY
all the way to LA - a trip
that would probably
take you a couple of
days, a hefty cost on
fuel, wear and tear on
you the driver, wear
and tear on your car,
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serious risk of getting into an accident.
The second approach you can use to accomplish this would be to leverage the
strengths of both driving and flying. To do so, you would drive in your car to an
off-site parking near the airport. You’ll park your car and then board an airplane
that would take you from NY to LA. In this case, each of these modes of
transportation— your car, and the airplane — come together and work in
synergy to accomplish your goal.
Using an airplane alone won’t be feasible because airplanes do not leave your
house’s doorsteps; you will need a means to get to the airport. On the other
hand, using a car alone won’t be efficient because the journey would be terribly
long and daunting. So, having an “EITHER” car (driving) “OR” airplane (flying)
mentality won’t work. But by combining the agility and versatility of a car ride,
with the speed and endurance of flight travel, you would be able to get to your
destination in the most effective and efficient manner.
One could draw parallels in this analogy in the way cars can be complimentary
to airplanes to the way Microsoft Excel can be complimentary to Enterprise BI
solutions. MS Excel comparatively is less expensive, with a slightly lower learning
curve and is good for quick and dirty summing, sorting, coloring and standard
graphs E.t.c. But when it comes to large scale data warehouse projects and heavy
weight ETL, MS Excel simply isn’t up to the job.

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It is understandable
that with a bit of
tweaking, savvy
power users can
leverage FREE (yes,
FREE as in free air
to breathe) OLAP
in-memory technologies such as PowerPivot to build MS Excel spreadsheets that
can literarily walk outside and compete for the America’s got talent show. For
this types of users, the ubiquity, agility, and versatility of MS Excel clearly wins
the day. But once scaled, with growing needs in the Mobile world and operating
without boundaries or a cohesive business context,
MS Excel becomes error prone, with inconsistent data sources, master data
mismanagement, corrupt files, and inadequate security around data. In cases
like this, a solid enterprise Business intelligence tool is needed. And companies
must consider pulling in the big guns like SAS, Cognos, SAP, and QlikView to do
the job. Knowing when MS Excel alone would suffice or when it’s time to procure
a more robust Enterprise BI tool to complement MS Excel is the million dollar
question here and the solution is neither art nor science. But as I mentioned
earlier, staying stuck in a philosophy of “EITHER OR” is definitely not the way to
go either.
At the end of the day, we must realize that MS Excel and Enterprise BI solutions
are not mutually exclusive. If nothing else, they should serve to complement
each other. Just like the way a car ride complemented the air plane ride in the
analogy above to take a user from NY to LA – MS Excel should be able to
complement a more robust Enterprise BI solutions to meet the needs of power
and non-power users.
Key take Away:
 Always try to use the right tool for the right job
 MS Excel and Enterprise BI solutions are not mutually exclusive
Recommended Read:
 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg413261.aspx
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