Every new Office version has a set of themes, and the new features are grouped around those themes. For Excel 2010, the themes were to improve Excel’s reputation in the scientific community and to make Excel the premier tool for Business Intelligence.
As I have done lots of data analysis in the past and continuing to do that, I love the new features for analyzing data. I also remember that while I loved wrangling large data sets into meaningful analyses, I never wanted to spend the time to make those meaningful analyses look “pretty.” Excel 2010 offers new graphics improvements that make it easy to add some visual interest to your numbers. Follow this link to know more about the new features of Excel 2010.
Here lets see what makes Excel 2010, a better tool for Business Intelligence:
PowerPivot Add-In: You can now sort, filter, and pivot data sets that are beyond 1 million rows. The PowerPivot tool allows you to mash up 100 million rows of data from Excel, text files, RSS Feeds, SQL Server, Oracle, and more. A new DAX expression language offers time intelligence functions that enable you to compare fiscal year-to-date sales with the parallel period from a year ago.
Pivot Table Slicers: Filtering data in pivot tables becomes visual with graphical filters known as Slicers. In previous versions of Excel, the filter drop-downs offered the capability to choose Multiple Items, but no one reading the report could tell what was included or not included. These new graphical filters show what is in the summary report and invite people to do ad-hoc analyses by choosing new options from the slicers.
Asymmetric Pivot Tables: Do you need to show last year’s actuals versus this year’s budget? That was hard to do in previous versions of Excel, but the Named Sets command for pivot tables created from OLAP data make it easy in Excel 2010. Don’t have OLAP? Run your Excel data through PowerPivot to enable Named Sets.
Percentage of Parent Item in Pivot Tables: New calculations in the Show Values As drop-down allow for calculations such as Percentage of Parent row, Rank, and more.
AGGREGATE function: Whereas Excel 2007 added the plural SUMIFS function, the killer function in Excel 2010 is AGGREGATE. This function is like the SUBTOTAL function on steroids. You have 19 calculation options instead of the 11 in SUBTOTAL, plus the capability to ignore hidden rows, filtered rows, or error cells.
And the above discussed 5 points also seems to be an improvement over Excel 2007 and which in turn makes Excel 2010 a better tool for Business Intelligence. Follow this link to know more about the new features of Excel 2010.