But can it export to Excel?

Most business decisions are made by figuring out what company data is telling us. If the data is not mined and applied effectively, making sense of the information can become nightmarish, take up valuable hours, break the budget and possibly even provide incorrect results.

In spite of our collective understanding that business decisions need data, the challenge of transforming lumpy data into usable information, and then into knowledge and insight, remains.

A major problem with Business Intelligence (BI) software is not how information gets analysed inside the solution, but how it is reported out.

All businesses, no matter what BI tools they are using from the thousands available, eventually export the data to Excel. Think about it. When was the last time your board packs, salary compensation packages, or [insert other much used doc here] were delivered in a way that wasn't an Excel spreadsheet?

For all the discussions about its effectiveness and usability as a BI tool, Excel has something that very few others have - everyone knows how to use it a little bit. It is the ultimate 'self-service' BI tool. This is continually proven by the fact that for many, an important BI solution selection criterion is whether there is an 'export to Excel' function as a standard feature.

While enterprises tend to use powerful and dedicated software for BI functions, most users eventually migrate the data to the more comfortable world of Excel.

So we ask the question, if, in the end, you're exporting to Excel anyway, why not simply start there? The Excel family of BI tools can support a business from wherever it is in its analytics journey whether all you need is Native Excel to run basic calculations, PowerPivot and PowerQuery to do data modelling, cleansing and aggregation of data from different business systems or PowerBI.com which brings the power of dashboards and the cloud to businesses.

There is almost nothing that Excel can't do and no reason to look outside the suite for answers.

As the world's most used desktop application, it is the technology of business decisions. This is not a problem. Using Excel poorly is the problem. With a proper understanding of how to work with Excel, businesses can transform their data into insight.

About e-magination

e-magination is an information management and consulting company that specialises in helping companies create meaningful and insightful reports that take businesses forward.

It develops, designs and supports instruments that integrate with a company's existing data software and tools to ensure the information it gets is not only accurate, but also useful. The company's unbiased view of different technologies from Excel to Cognos or PHP to Visual Basic helps it ensure that clients have the right tools and skills to get the information and insight they need.

With almost two decades' experience working in business and IT environments, e-magination's consultants have enabled many clients to turn data into insight to design reports that deliver directly to the business need.

For more information visit www.e-magination.co.za.