Can Microsoft make Excel exciting with GeoFlow? [TechEd]

Microsoft’s latest addition to the Excel 2013 & Office 365 suite is a nifty little plugin called GeoFlow. GeoFlow for Excel is a 3D visualization tool for mapping, exploring & interacting with geographical and temporal data, allowing people to discover and share new insights.

The tool, which offers a wide variety of options and customizing, allows you to visualize how geospatial patterns, such as clusters, trends or outliers, change over time. Once the insights have been identified and collated, they can be packaged into an interactive guide, which can be exported to a variety of video formats, allowing you to embed them in your PowerPoint presentations.

While the plugin provides an amazing visual view of geographical big data, there are a couple of pitfalls to the preview product. The reverse geo-coding is done using the Bing map data, which in South Africa isn’t up to 100% usable quality yet. For example, when trying to show data for the Johannesburg area, the geo-coding service returns the city as a province instead, skewing the visual data results.

The GeoFlow plugin for Excel 2013 & Office 365 is now available for download as a preview option from the Microsoft Office site.

The plugin is for Excel 2013 & Office 365.