Microsoft Excel
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From: Developing big data solutions on Microsoft Azure HDInsight
Excel is one of the most widely used data manipulation and visualization applications in the world, and is commonly used as a tool for interactive data analysis and reporting. It supports comprehensive data import and connectivity options that include built-in data connectivity to a wide range of data sources, and the availability of add-ins such as Power Query, Power View, PowerPivot, and Power Map. Additionally, Power BI for Office 365 provides a cloud-based platform for sharing data and reports in Excel workbooks across the enterprise.
Excel includes a range of analytical tools and visualizations that you can apply to tables of data in one or more worksheets within a workbook. All Excel 2013 workbooks encapsulate a data model in which you can define tables of data and relationships between them. These data models make it easier to “slice and dice” data in PivotTables and PivotCharts, and to create Power View visualizations.
Office 2013 and Office 365 ProPlus are available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. If you plan to use Excel to build data models and perform analysis of big data processing results, the 64-bit version of Office is recommended because of its ability to handle larger volumes of data.
Excel is especially useful when you want to add value and insight by augmenting the results of your data analysis with external data. For example, you may perform an analysis of social media sentiment data by geographical region in HDInsight, and consume the results in Excel. This geographically oriented data can be enhanced by subscribing to a demographic dataset in the Azure Marketplace. The socio-economic and population data may provide an insight into why your organization is more popular in some locations than in others.
As well as datasets that you can download and use to augment your results, Azure Marketplace includes a number of data services that you can use for data validation (for example, verifying that telephone numbers and postal codes are valid) and for data transformation (for example, looking up the country or region, state, and city for a particular IP address or longitude/latitude value).
The following topics describe the tools and techniques you can use to import and visualize data using Excel: