Excel as a front end for the Cloud? Really? Cloud scale processing for your Excel spreadsheets!
I love that Excel can be used with the Azure cloud, and the video explains it better than I can write about. This allows you to use the familiar Excel interface with the power of Azure! This means that you are no longer locked into the capacity limits of your corporate servers, of course you shouldn’t use the Azure cloud without permission from your security office, or making sure that the data can be used outside of your corporate boundary.
For more information: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/azure/datascope.aspx