Hands-on PowerPivot: To the Cloud

I previously wrote about an interesting demonstration that involved a 44-milliion-record data set imported into PowerPivot, Microsoft's coming "self-service business intelligence" add-in for Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Connecting to a cloud data service, importing a feed into Excel and culling BI info from the data is remarkably easy. You can try it for free with the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta (requires registration) and PowerPivot for Excel 2010.