Not surprisingly, Microsoft itself uses this to provide Big Data services right within Excel – Excel is one of the primary clients to enable big data analytics on Microsoft platforms.

The importance of Excel 2010 in conjunction with SQL Server 2008 R2 lies in the PowerPivot feature that incorporates extensive column compression technology named “VertiPaq”.

You can enter data into a Microsoft Excel sheet or run a bit of M code in Microsoft Excel Power Query when you need to create a table.