The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

18.3. Future Directions: Room for Improvement

There are organizations dedicated to trying to figure out what Microsoft is going to do next. We have no interest in playing that game, so rather than trying to predict the future, we'll highlight a few of the areas we'd like to see Microsoft improve on.

18.3.1. Query Tools

Excel, despite being the most popular data tool on the market, is not the ideal query and reporting tool. There are several problems, the most troubling of which is that Excel is fundamentally a two-dimensional grid. It's hard for us to imagine how the Excel team will address this issue without creating a whole new product, or breaking the existing (hugely valuable) product. Lucky for us, this isn't our problem.

The existing query interfaces for Excel are imperfect, too. Queries from Excel into the Analysis Services database are limited. The mechanism for specifying a relational query is archaic. We detested it 12 years ago when we first saw it, and it hasn't improved since then.

CIOs hate Excel for the same reason business users love it: Where's the control? Because Excel pulls data to the local PC, it's really hard for an organization to control what happens to it after that. Users can create all sorts of crazy calculations. They can email data to their friends. They can attempt to download a billion-row result set.

We've seen pre-release demos of the next version of Office that address some of these issues. In addition, the Report Builder functionality in Reporting ...