Microsoft has made available a preview of its GeoFlow add-on for Excel 2013, which allows users to create interactive, 3D geospatial and temporal data visualisations.
GeoFlow enables information professionals to map over one million rows of data from an Excel workbook, including Excel Data Model and PowerPivot, onto Bing maps in 3D.
Four visualisation types available columns, heat maps, and bubbles.
The goal has always been to bring dynamic, interactive data visualisation to the business world.
The add-on also allows organisations to compare changes in data relative to geography over time and create cinematic guided tours of the data.
These functions, Microsoft claims, will enable information analysts to discover new insights into their data and engage audiences with the information more readily.
The tool, which was first demoed at the Redmond giant's Sharepoint Conference 2012 in November, is built on research emanating from Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope project, which, the company says, visualises terabytes of imagery and data from the astronomy community.
Curtis Wong, principal researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, who has worked on both the WorldWide Telescope and GeoFlow projects said: "With the dramatic growth in geospatial and temporal data, we wanted to explore new toolsthat could help us understand the large-scale temporal and geospatial trends that affect businesses."
"The goal has always been to bring dynamic, interactive data visualisation to the business world. If we can visualise the universe [with the WorldWide Telescope], we can visualise almost anything else," Wong added.
The public preview of the GeoFlow software is available for download immediately. A date for the full release has not yet been announced.
