Panorama Business Intelligence

We keep hearing that Excel is the “simple to use” tool that will help make BI pervasive across the organization. 

I guess this really depends on what you call BI. If BI is a bunch of numbers in cells then this statement is true. Everybody knows how to use Excel by putting numbers in cells and doing basic manipulations such as sorting and filtering the grid. 

But when I think about BI and analytics I actually think about doing more OLAP-based analysis. For that you need PivotTables inside Excel to make it an effective BI tool.   How many people really use PivotTables? Very few! That is because it is not that simple and intuitive. 

So why do some vendors think that Excel is the tool that makes BI pervasive when, in fact, it doesn’t really combine the two fundamentals of power and ease-of-use?