Same Problems, More Zeroes: Why the Spreadsheet (and PowerPivot) Will Dominate Big Data Usage

The early hype and messaging usually portray Big Data as a Big Project:  the next frontier for elite Business Intelligence professionals, or perhaps the domain of software engineering teams.  But what if Big Data’s future is actually much more…  mundane?  Minus the capital letters, data has always been “big” – even 100 rows of data usually exceeds the human capacity for digesting into insight; we have always employed tools to turn “big” into something concise.  For the past several decades, spreadsheets have been the overwhelmingly dominant tool of choice.  Today, the power of even modest desktop hardware paired with dramatic developments in the Excel engine have spreadsheets poised to extend their ubiquity into the Big Data era.