10 reasons to use Data Explorer from the Community

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Before starting this post, I want to thank all of our customers for commenting about how much they love Data Explorer. Keep on giving us your feedback, we are reading your comments, and plan to create more tutorials based on your comments. In fact, please let me know what tutorials you would like in our product documentation that would help the Data Explorer community the most.

As of today, here is a partial list of how customers plan to use Data Explorer.

  1. Build a simple table showing your sales broken down by product in an Excel spreadsheet, you could build this quite easily with Data Explorer. Thanks Chris Webb for this observation.
  2. Create a query from your Facebook likes that render an Excel chart. Check out pic.twitter.com/QjuuYZAbcx.
  3. Import data from multiple log files. Check out this blog post.
  4. Traverse the Facebook Graph. Check out this blog post.
  5. Pull data into PowerPivot from new data sources, such as XML, Facebook, and File Folders as refreshable connections. Check out this blog post.
  6. Import data from a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional data sources including CSV, Windows Azure SQL Database, Oracle, MySQL, SharePoint list, OData Feed, Facebook.
  7. Merge and shape data sources to match your data analysis requirements or prepare it for further analysis and modeling by tools such as PowerPivot and PowerView.
  8. Connect to Big Data in Excel 2013.
  9. Self-service ETL tool for the Excel power user. Enhances the self-service Business Intelligence experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery and access. Check out this blog post.
  10. Create dynamic lookups. Check out this blog post.