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Comment by saganus | Hacker News Reader

And as I understand BI, also for when you want complex graphs that can't be easily modeled in Excel.

With BI solutions you can perform "slices" as they call it, of multi-dimensional data (cubes), and then represent that as graphs that can also be used for drill-down on one or more dimensions of said data.

When you have say 17 dimensions, these solutions are easier to use than using excel to try to do the same.

I have only implemented very simple BI solutions a couple of times, so anyone with more experience can correct me if I'm wrong.

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It's all just pivot tables, in the end. Excel solved most data slicing/drilldown problems years ago. Only issue has always been data size limits and access to live, up to data data (though Excel's also been able to hit external OLAP services for data for a long time too).

I'd like to affirm your claim that Pivot Tables and Excel can match pretty much any BI related inquiry where data is available. Caveat - the data will fit in Excel

Source: Experience in Wall Street, Fortune 500 risk management, and dumping stuff from SalesForce to make it useable beyond what our implementation would report (or what leadership could get it to do).

And the data size limit is excel is stifling. 1m maximum rows? That can get filled very quickly.

With Power Pivot it's quite a bit better, this guy did 122 million rows:

http://www.microsofttrends.com/2014/02/09/how-much-data-can-...

If that's not enough you can do SSAS Tabular + DirectQuery (although to be fair, that's no longer "pure Excel", but an end user likely doesn't care):

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh230898.aspx

Excel gets a bad rap. You can do a lot in Excel including slicing multidimensional data and pivot tables. You can also pull data externally and connect to external data pipelines.

Excel is point and click and allows for a wide rang of programming skill. There are also a lot of plugins and of course you can work in offline mode. It is also easy to integrate old Excel data etc... And you don't need a full time programmer who knows javascript etc or some other language to produce something.

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