Data Analysis on Every Desktop?Rushed to market, widely available Data Analyzer may be widely unusedBy David McAmis Continued from Page 1 In terms of creating views of OLAP data, graphs are nice. But sometimes you want to see only the data behind the scenes. The grid view provides this functionality, but it is very rudimentary and lacks the basic features found in similar BI tools. Swapping or changing dimensions or filters is difficult within the product, and the dimensions are not clearly represented. Switching over to a bar or pie chart is easy once you find the cryptic "eye" icon in the lower left-hand corner, but there are only these two formats to choose from and no options are available for formatting the charts or any of the elements within. (If you like a faded blue background and yellow pie pieces, you should be fine.) When exporting to PowerPoint, Data Analyzer faithfully recreates the views you created using graphics and provides a near WYSIWYG export from Data Analyzer. When you are saving to HTML, it's a completely different story: Data Analyzer attempts to recreate your view's design using HTML, and the results are mixed. The changes you make to the grid (column size, for example) are not reflected in the exported HTML file, and it recreates bar graph elements using tables and cells. Strangely enough, there is not an option to export the pie charts to HTML, so if you're using them in your view, you have to pick another export method. Exporting to Excel is much more useful; the Pivot Table export is the real star. There is a wizard to guide you through selecting the dimensions and other attributes that will appear in your table, and the export process runs smoothly, even on large data sets. Conversely, when I used the straight export of the data to Excel, the resulting spreadsheet ended up formatted with a funky mix of headings and colors, and on closer inspection, the data that came across was incorrect. Values that had been marked "N/A" within Data Analyzer exported across as a strange string value that had to be deleted, and columns were exported in the wrong order. If you are going to export from Data Analyzer to Excel, you want to make sure you stick with the Pivot Table export option until these issues have been sorted out. BEFORE ITS TIMEThe product appears to have been rushed to market. Clearly, Microsoft still has some work to do on it. A number of features and functionality would have made this a tremendous tool for business users, but the implementation of those features falls short of the mark. As Data Analyzer matures, I am sure that the product's growing pains will subside and it will become more tightly integrated into the Office suite. Until Microsoft can get some of these issues sorted out, the other BI vendors don't have anything to worry about. David McAmis [dmcamis@hotmail.com] is an IT consultant, journalist, author, broadcaster, and expert in business intelligence who lives and works in Sydney, Australia. RESOURCESRelated Article at IntelligentEnterprise.com:
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