Excel And BI: Best Buddies Forever

Everybody likes product reviews, and we have a new one here on Business Intelligence Pipeline from our own uber-reviewer, Jacques Surveyer. Jacques take an under-the-hood look at Business Objects' Xcelsius and Xcelsius Workgroup, tools the BI bellwether based on technology it acquired from Infommersion last year.Business Objects touts the Xcelsius line as an easy way to create dashboard and portal content by pulling it from Excel data, with all the usual Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), drill-downs, and "what-if" analyses on the reporting side. Jacques finds much truth to those claims, but as usual his jaded eye also finds a shortfall or two with the software.