One of the more interesting technology battles this year (and probably 2008) will pit Microsoft's Office 2007 coupled with SQL Server 2005 against established business intelligence players. That fact ...

SQL Server 2008 R2, which ships this month, allows end users to tap into the powerful business intelligence features of SQL Server via tight integration with popular Microsoft applications like Excel.

With most Excel spreadsheets, you enter data manually into cells and then use formulas or other functions to analyze it or perform calculations. If you have a large data source, such as an Access ...