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Excel - PowerPivot - future of Excel, end of Access?

Introduction

Below is a short video showing the new business intelligence addin for Excel 2010: PowerPivot. PowerPivot extends the existing PivotTable functionality. As well as extensive improvements to data handling, PowerPivot makes it much quicker and easier to construct graphical presentations of large volumes of data. It also includes a whole new set of functions for analysing raw data.

In the example below we're just showing how quickly as set of four PivotCharts can be set up, based on some data held in an Access database. For this example we have just used a couple of thousand records, but we've tried exactly the same thing with over two million records. Apart from a slightly longer time to import the records, the process is the same:

This isn't really the end of Microsoft Access, but PowerPivot is going to allow Excel to take over many of the data collection and collation tasks that Access would previously have been needed for. At the very least, we might have to replace 'Access' with 'PowerPivot' in the title of our 'Microsoft Access - the best Excel addin' course.