The flexibility of Microsoft Excel has seen it grow to dominate the world of data management software, since its release in 1985. But even Excel has its limitations, 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns with a maximum width of 255 characters (Microsoft, 2019), to be exact. However, it is not Excels capacity to store data that is the challenge to its dominance, in a world that is increasingly data driven, but rather the constraints Excel places on how information can be presented and queried. Excel is a tabulated tool, it presents information in a list, organised in rows and columns that the human brain processes by looking down or along. The way the human brain processes tabulated data leads to some obvious limitations to its usefulness in presenting large data sets or trend analysis. The vast majority of people would fail to identify a trend or pattern in a tabulated data set; unless the data is already organised in that order, as most people will analyse it sequentially.
CITATION: Vincent, C, Demmer, M and Boddington, S, 2019. Beyond Excel: power BI and your databases, in Proceedings Future Mining 2019, pp 8384 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).