The Visual Spreadsheet

Tableau Software : There are claims that this is the next Google. I don't believe it ... though they seem to have an innovative product set

A Visual Spreadsheet is an interactive canvas that allows you to explore, analyze and create reports from databases. It lets you display, filter, sort, group, drill-into, calculate and summarize data using a "live" interactive window into your databases. The results are remarkable: You can answer questions quicker than you can with any other data analysis tool.

 

How do Visual Spreadsheets work?
They are remarkably simple. Tableau is a desktop PC application, just like Microsoft Excel. So you simply connect to a data source and start analyzing. Every time you drop a field from the database onto the Visual Spreadsheet, you get a new view of your data. Sometimes these views are composed of text tables or crosstabs that summarize information. Often, they are graphic visualizations that show trends, relationships, problems and outliers.