Excel 2010 - What is new?

I have now been using Office 2010 CTP since the beginning of August and it's now time to give my view on Excel 2010 from a Business Intelligence point of view.

So, what's new? Not much actually, it feels more or less like Excel 2007 except the blue color. It feels more like a service pack or something. They have fixed many things that felt strange in Excel 2007. So the overall judgement is that Excel 2010 is a little bit better in general.

The two major changes that I think is of importance to Business Intelligence users is: Pivot Slicers and Sparklines.

Pivot Slicers
This is nothing but a flat pivot filter but with some intelligence. Instead of drilling down in a tree view, you can now filter from a more intuitive user interface. The main thing however, is that the slicer knows the choices in the filter that contains information.

The typical scenario is when using the time dimension on the current year. The month or quarters that hasn't happened yet, are greyed out. In the example below, there is no male with 5 children that has 0-1 cars in the underlying data set. This works with cubes, tables and PowerPivot (Gemini).

Sparklines

Sparklines is a nice feature, a small diagram in a cell. You can quickly get a feeling for historical data. I can't say it's a revolution but a nice feature. This will also be available in reporting services 2008 R2.

That's it... The big revolution was Excel 2007, now it's just a little bit better in general.