REDMOND, Wash., July 10, 2001 — Microsoft Corp. today announced a new product in the Microsoft® Office XP family, Microsoft Data Analyzer, which will offer innovative graphical analysis and data visualization capabilities that will enable people to rapidly identify new business opportunities, trends or issues. Data Analyzer will be released later this fall. Pricing and availability will be announced at a later date.
“Data Analyzer is a great addition to the Office XP family because it enables any business decision-maker to perform sophisticated tasks with an easy-to-use tool,”
said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Office at Microsoft.
“Microsoft is committed to enabling people to unlock hidden knowledge and expand what they can do with their desktop productivity tools. The introduction of Data Analyzer is an example of how Microsoft will continue to provide users with powerful new tools to improve productivity.”
Data Analyzer Delivers Advanced Analytical and Visualization Capabilities
Data Analyzer will enable people to quickly and easily analyze business data for intuitive business analysis, easily publish and share data with others, and improve data analysis productivity because it can do the following:
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Offer unique visualization capabilities and graphical views that enable people to rapidly identify opportunities and trends, find business anomalies, and review multiple sets of data in one interface for better decision-making
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Provide a variety of options on how people examine data through displaying multiple measures, such as gross profit, unit sales or quantity, or displaying relationships between unlimited business dimensions, such as customer, region or product, in a single, easy-to-use interface
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Empower people to easily publish and share data with others, access data-analysis tools via the Web, and share data graphically in the wide range of Office applications, including Excel 2002 and PowerPoint® 2002
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Deliver a guided analysis tool that provides people with standardized questions for analyzing data, built-in template measures that can easily identify key performance indicators, and filters that can quickly select and filter certain criteria
“Individuals are continually challenged with analyzing and visualizing information within the context of the software that they use most often,”
said Mark Smith, Full Circle Strategies.
“Microsoft has enriched the capabilities within Microsoft Office with Data Analyzer to extend the richness and power of Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint to meet these needs.”
New Resource for Industry Partners
Data Analyzer extends Microsoft’s current Business Intelligence offering of SQL Server™
2000 and Office XP, which provides Excel 2002, Office Web Components and digital dashboards with rich visualization and analysis capabilities.
“Today’s announcement is further recognition of the pervasive value of business intelligence,”
said Patrick O’Leary, vice president of Strategic Alliances, Cognos Inc.
“As an industry partner for enterprise business intelligence, Cognos will continue to work with Microsoft to extend the value of the Microsoft platform by delivering enterprise-class reporting and analysis functionality.”
The Data Analyzer technology is complementary to many of the industry’s independent software vendor (ISV) partners’ offerings and enables Microsoft to bring new solution opportunities to industry partners. Data Analyzer will be an additional resource for valued industry partners, such as value added resellers and solution providers, that will be able to quickly learn and use Data Analyzer as the basis for custom solutions. Microsoft will be working closely with these industry partners as Data Analyzer becomes available.
“Data Analyzer is an exciting new desktop tool for general business analysis. This product is complementary to our ProClarity product family, which focuses on building tailored enterprise-class analytic applications that meet the wide-ranging analytic and deployment requirements of large organizations,”
said Clay Young, vice president of marketing for ProClarity Corp.
“We’re pleased to continue to work with Microsoft to ensure that our customers understand the benefits of both classes of products and to deliver industry-leading Microsoft SQL Server 2000 analysis services solutions.”
About Office XP
Office XP provides a much smarter work experience for individuals, teams and organizations. Office XP makes productivity simple for individuals by helping them get the most out of Office and giving them tools they can rely on. Office XP enables collaboration for everyone by revolutionizing the way people work with others on documents and introducing SharePoint™
Team Services to manage projects and activities via the Web. Office XP also provides a flexible way to solve business needs by delivering rich business solutions and improved security and reliability tools businesses need to deploy and manage Office.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
Microsoft, PowerPoint and SharePoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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