Gain Business Insight with Office 2007

The world of a typical employee has changed dramatically in recent years. We often hear terms like "empowered" to describe employees, and while that term may be overused and cliché, it is a fact that modern companies expect more from every individual employee. Long gone are the days of mindless drones sitting around responding to orders that come down from above. Today, everyone is responsible for business performance management. In essence, we have all become CEO of our own little part of the company. The only way to do this is through gaining real Business Intelligence. We need to turn the mountains of data we now access into more than just information – we need to turn it into true insight.

No vendor in our industry is more keenly aware of this than Microsoft. While it may sound like a slick marketing campaign, Microsoft truly does build tools for the People Ready Business. These tools enable information workers to understand the data they are bombarded with, analyze and optimize that data, and use it to drive the business forward. The very foundation upon which these tools are built is the Microsoft Office System, and the release of Office 2007 advances these efforts light years forward.

Every time Microsoft releases a new version of Office, we talk about the new features and functions. With Office 2007, Microsoft has decided for the first time in more than a decade to make revolutionary changes. From the user interface to the file format, Office 2007 is an entirely new product. Today we are going to focus on the functionality, most importantly how Office 2007 can be used as a tool to provide Business Intelligence for the masses.

Excel 2007 will be a powerful tool in the hands of everyday information workers who need to analyze data in order to extract vital insights. The reason why Business Intelligence has been limited to the few is because it has required additional applications to truly access it. Instead of trying to take people into BI, Microsoft is bringing BI to the 400 million people already using Excel. They are bringing BI to where you work every day – inside Office. Excel 2007 can connect to enterprise data and maintain a permanent connection between a workbook and the data source, enabling not only easy updates to Excel worksheets, but also the ability to "drill down" within Excel to more detailed levels of information. Powerful information analysis tools in Excel 2007 help you and your workers quickly and accurately extract meaning from Excel data. New data visualization capabilities, PivotTable and PivotChart views, and formula-based access to enterprise data help you integrate Business Intelligence with spreadsheets.

Excel is not the only member of the Office 2007 suite that you can leverage to gain valuable insight into your business. The entire product suite has been revamped, and everything from Outlook (support for RSS feeds) to PowerPoint (featuring enterprise slide libraries) to Word (content management and workflow) has been built to better support your organization. Of course the glue that holds it all together is SharePoint which not only allows you to farm and manage that valuable business insight, but makes it available to all your users, whenever they need it.

The update to Office 2007 is very exciting. There have been features and functions in previous versions that have always peaked our interest, but nothing like this. Microsoft has truly seen the needs of the modern company and put together the tools and resources that can meet them. Now is the time to start evaluating an Office 2007 upgrade for your company and start turning all the data in your company into true Business Intelligence.