Yeah, who needs over-engineered W3C Semantic-this Semantic-that, XQuery this, XPath that, RDF this, SVG that, XSLT this, WSDL this, SOAP that when we have Excel! I contend that most "mere mortals" will feel lost in a sea of W3C Semantic This-That and so why not go with the tools that people do indeed know best? While we can mod_rewrite web documents, we're not going to rewrite a generation of people's neurons who were weaned on Office! Nice job guys!

Very, very cool. But it's very coolness is the problem. I am a regular user of excel and I don't really have a handle on when and how to use pivot tables, much less how to glue controls to a spreadsheet using VB.

What you're doing in your example is beyond 99.99% of excel's users. You HAVE made it clear that data visualization wizards would be a useful extention to excel, however.

Thanks James,

There's a population of ordinary business folks (OBFs) that are not programmers and not that technical. It takes a long time to wire those neurons and Excel, at least, is something they're comfortable with.

There is a lot of ad-hoc analysis and ETL that ordinary business folks need to do every day; merge two tables, profile some data, diagnose how a process is working. Business Intelligence tools aren't flexible enough to answer all the questions that arise everyday, and it's well outside of the OBF skill-set to build a OLAP cube to solve some problem.

Excel can cover a lot of this ground if people recognize what they can do with the tools they already have.

- Chris Gemignani

Thanks Jonathan,

This is an extreme example, made to illustrate a point--that Excel is a serious tool for understanding your business that is on almost every desktop.

I agree this capability is beyond most users. We're building an add-in to make some of these "business intelligence" features more usable. Open-source, ETA: TBD.

Three comments: a) The data shown in the excel and flash versions are different; where's the bug? b) There are two clusters in the flash version, one exploding and one imploding. That must be a bug. Golfers could not display such a coordinated behaviour even if they wanted to c) It doesn't take much to add a feature to excel to create an animation of a chart by simply displaing an extra dimension as temporal dimension. Unfortunately we'll have to wait for Google to enter the spreadsheet business to see that, in accordance to the "freedom (not) to innovate" principle

Any chance of putting up a non-Flash version of the pics?

"We strongly agree: we like to begin our analysis projects with visualization, particularly understand rich customer behavior" as an opening comment in your demo does not inspire much confidence. The logic of the demo also seems suspect once the "gee whiz" factor starts to fade. You show a chart with a few points, comparing one observation over time to a smallish number of others--you are displaying the whole of a small universe, and so obviate the need for statistical testing. What does a chart like this do for us when we need to sample from a larger universe and the significance of apparent differences becomes an important consideration?

Can you provide more details on the single line of VB code to display this. Maybe it's my browser, but I don't see the line of code or understand how the scrollbar is added. Thanks.

This demo has a great "gee whiz" factor. But in my mind, it does not demonstrate the point of the data very well. It is difficult to see what the data is telling me.

Hi,

Still now I didn't knew that in excel we can do this many things. Its really excellent which I ever seen before. Now for me Excel seems to be an ocean and I'm at starting point of it.

Thank you very much and its a wonderful work done.

Great job! I somtimes use such crazy solutions in Excel too and I like to 'play' with Excel features like author did. I think showing and explaining Excel is more effective using screencasts than explaining with screenshots and desctiptive text.
But like Jonathan Peterson Says:

What you’re doing in your example is beyond 99.99% of excel’s users. You HAVE made it clear that data visualization wizards would be a useful extention to excel, however.

Its' true this screencast is understoodable only for Excel freaks.
I have started my blog where I put some Excel tutorials for beginners how to use Excel for simple data analysis: <a href='http://screencast.edu.pri.ee' rel="nofollow">Learning by Screencast</a>