Excel Spreadsheets are frequently used in Data Warehousing applications
to access and present data from Data Marts. Spreadsheets are powerful,
flexible and relatively inexpensive tools that many decision makers are comfortable
using.
Before Data Warehousing became popular, decision makers often had
difficulty getting access to corporate data. It was necessary to
populate spreadsheets from multiple disparate data sources and manually
integrate the data. This process was both time consuming and
error-prone. Privacy, data redundancy and currency issues
arose when decision makers retained their own personal copies of sensitive
corporate data on thepersonal computers and laptops.
In a Data Warehousing environment, a subset of the cleansed and
integrated corporate data is copied from the Data Warehouse to a Data Mart.
The spreadsheet then accesses the Data Mart directly. Where
necessary, data from the Data Mart can be copied
to a personal computer.
Excel and other spreadsheet applications provide Pivot Table capabilities
that allow users to separate "facts" (numeric data to be summed) from
"dimensions" (used for filtering, sorting and grouping).
Excel also provides graphing capabilities that permit the end user to
present information in chart and graph formats. These diagrams can
be easily incorporated into MS Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, web
pages, etc.
The use of Excel Spreadsheets to present and analyze data from Data
Warehouses is an inexpensive and flexible method for sharing business
intelligence.
