A few days ago I mentioned I was writing a series of posts for CIMA Insight, which is the monthly web magazine of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants – an audience that knows Excel quite well but probably has yet to discover PowerPivot.
Given that this series is starting from scratch, with an introductory post, it is mostly “old news” for readers here. But there are perhaps some high level explanatory points that are new. For instance, this diagram I sketched to explain the traditional tradeoffs between spreadsheets and formal BI: – a decision that results in impractically high costs sooner or later:
PowerPivot, of course, provides a curve that shares the low startup costs of spreadsheets AND the long-term maintainability and robustness of formal BI. Literally, PowerPivot is the end of that “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
To read the whole (brief) part one of the series, please click here.
As always, I’m interested in your comments.
