Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, was founded in 1975 and has become a household name primarily due to its Windows operating system and Office suite. With its offerings, Microsoft wants to contribute to a modern workspace for its customers, whether they are private individuals or large enterprises. The vendor has a broad enterprise offering, ranging from cloud (Azure) to database to its ERP products.
Microsoft was among the first vendors to focus on providing cloud-based solutions for analytics, a path later followed by several competitors. Azure is used by numerous companies as a cloud computing platform and for storing substantial amounts of data, putting Microsoft in a good position to offer integrated analytics front ends. Indeed, the vendor has not only integrated Power BI, its core BI & analytics platform, with many Azure Services and Microsoft products but has also included it in various product packages. One of the most recent is Microsoft Fabric, designed as an integrated end-to-end data and analytics platform delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS). The package contains several Azure services such as Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory and many more. The core value proposition and advantage for customers is that the already stitched together services facilitate the building up of a SaaS environment consisting of data and analytics services. One of the additional benefits is the obligatory Data Lake ‘OneLake’, which is automatically connected with all other Fabric services and can be used by customers without extra configuration.
Microsoft Excel – part of the Microsoft 365 suite – provides a range of functions catering to the needs of business intelligence and analytics professionals. Among these, the Power Query integration enables users to import, transform and cleanse data from various sources. Power Pivot lets users create data models, establish relationships between tables and perform advanced calculations using Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). PivotTables and PivotCharts are available for data analysis, allowing users to summarize data and visualize trends. Excel also offers advanced analytical capabilities through Solver, which addresses complex optimization and simulation scenarios. Moreover, Excel’s graphical functionality supports the creation of dashboards. However, in practice, Excel is most commonly used for data management tasks, detailed analysis and reporting in pure Excel tables.
Microsoft was among the first vendors to focus on providing cloud-based solutions for analytics, a path later followed by several competitors. Nowadays, Microsoft 365 is used by numerous companies in the cloud.
This product review describes the analysis product Excel. Microsoft Power BI is covered separately in The BI & Analytics Survey 25.
