

But they knew what they wanted.” Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 - PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010 - RTM is available for download here.While Microsoft is making its way toward the next generation of its data platform, the company is also kicking up a notch older releases of SQL Server. Some have never even heard the term ‘business intelligence.’ They speak a different language than we had been used to. “These customers aren’t IT or BI professionals.

“We spoke with hundreds of customers from a wide range of industries and geographies to try to understand how they would like to be able to use data analytics,” he added. We always do extensive user research, but for PowerPivot we had to find a new community of users to work with.” That’s where Farmer’s unusual background proved invaluable. “First, we had to learn about the specific needs and preferences of end users. In this sense, Farmer even recalled taping customers for input, and discovering that simplicity was, without a doubt, the key to building a successful BI analysis solution. PowerPivot is Farmer’s brainchild, a man who set to simplify BI analysis as much as possible two and a half years ago. “That means they’ll be able to answer questions more quickly, experiment more and test ‘what-if’ scenarios. “With the managed self-service BI capabilities in PowerPivot that complement our existing BI technologies, they’ll be able to do such analyses themselves,” Farmer stated. Such tasks have virtually been democratized with the advent of PowerPivot. In this sense, no longer will IT professionals be needed in order to perform BI analysis and reporting. The software giant’s perspective is that PowerPivot’s data-analysis capabilities in the context of the computational power it brings to the table will enable businesses to leverage managed self-service BI more and more.ĭonald Farmer, principal program manager of the SQL Server Business Intelligence management team, revealed that PowerPivot represented a game-changing piece of technology.


SQL Server 2008 R2 PowerPivot for Excel 2010 RTM, formerly Project Gemini, was finalized as the Redmond company released SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 to business customers worldwide. Microsoft has released to manufacturing an extremely powerful Business Intelligence tool, designed to be used in concert with Excel 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2.
