How many times have you seen a colleague use MS Excel to create columns of text? Or build a sales contact database in MS Word? Once is too many. But we all gravitate to the application we know best instead of using something unfamiliar, though more suited to the task at hand.

A recent Intelligent Enterprise blog, “Excel Hell,” by Ventana analyst Mark Smith highlighted a SAS competitor who sought to empower MS Office-centric users with the power of query and reporting. This is certainly a worthwhile goal; self-service BI has so many benefits for both the user and the enterprise.

The software vendor he cites offers a “Microsoft Office-like user interface” as a panacea for less technical users seeking a familiar path to the data that will assist their decision-making. Still, I believe many casual users may be intimidated by that new tool and never even try it, thinking “tried-and-true” Excel is a better choice.

Why not take it a step further and remove the new software phobia completely? What if we could enable powerful BI for this class of users within actual Microsoft productivity applications, including Excel and Outlook? These are respectively the world’s most popular spreadsheet and email apps.

If you would like to hear more about how SAS enables BI without leaving the cozy confines of MS Office, consider this new post, also in Intelligent Enterprise, by “BI Scorecard” founder Cindi Howson.