I see this as exciting and very valuable. Any advancement into BI is great for business, Data Quality, and End Users. And any way to make it easier, faster, or better is excellent.

I could say that they are still out of date, but would rather celebrate that they are doing something about it.

i could also say that this will make the bad DW more available to the user and expose more problems with the data. But I choose to say that this will allow those building the DW and tending the data more rapid and better access to the data for better data mining and cleaning. Thus the better and easier the tool the easier it should be to raise the data quality. By the way we do not know we have bad data till we find it and if this new toolset helps us find it sooner, this is wonderful.

In the past I have built small BI solutions that do not see the light of day as far as the end user is concerned but have caused the quality of the data to rise considerably.

The new tools will make the job of the data professional better if they dig in and use them. Good step forward, and using Excel allows us to use a toolset that we know already and build on the success of a commonly known tool. It is a good idea.

Have a great day!