MSFT PowerPivot

For the past few months I've been using Tableau to look at microfinance data and compare it to our non-profit MFI Lumana.  Recently though, a colleague from my job at Hitachi Consulting demoed the new Microsoft PowerPivot (watch his video).  This is a free add-in for Excel 2010 that leverages the capability of pivot tables and is pretty slick.  There are a lot of advantages including a limitless row count (well, our testing so far hasn't been able to max it out), establishing a connection to multiple data sources at the same time from a wide variety of databases (Oracle, Teradata, Informix, and even Atom feeds), and of course the best part is being able to create relationships between tables.

The first picture shows the interface for viewing the tables and check the formatting, create calculated fields (measures), and manage relationships between tables (picture 2).  The final picture shows your normal Pivot Table window with the slicers (left) that allow for dynamic filtering and can be global or specific to a table or graph.  After completing your dashboard you can publish it to a SharePoint site and retain the active filtering and daily refreshing of data for others in your company.

When comparing the features of Tableau and PowerPivot I don't think one is better than the other, it just depends on your needs.  Tableau has a very beautiful interface that is incredibly easy for anyone to use regardless of comfort levels with software while PowerPivot retains the usual complexity and busy layout of MSFT software.  However, PowerPivot is a free add-in that builds on the robust capabilities of Excel which most business users already have and use daily.  

Additionally, Tableau dashboards can be published to managed servers and be viewed by anyone in any browser (or even embedded like in my previous blog posts).  In order to get the dynamic functionality of PowerPivot you have to have SharePoint which is about twice as expensive (for the basic version) per license as Tableau, but SharePoint has a tremendous amount of additional business management capabilities so you're definitely getting your money's worth.  

Finally, Tableau offers an array of useful tools such as maps, customized graphs, and allows you to display multiple measures in a single graph while PowerPivot only uses the same simple graphs Excel has always had, yet for the majority of businesses out there this is more than enough.  

So, as I said before, neither is better it just depends on your needs, but it's great to see that we all are finally getting choices on how to visualize data.

UPDATE 7/27/2010: I just read this Tableau update and it seems v 5.2 is able to connect to PowerPivot.  It also seems as though the PowerPivot sharepoint upload max size is 2GB but PowerPivotGeek.com has run files locally in PowerPivot that are 15GB - 20GB.