One of the most common pieces of reporting software in use today is Microsoft Excel. This is true in just about every company, whether they have a BI suite or not. Ask any financial controller which tool they prefer to use and their answer will nearly always be Excel, just because it allows not only to visualize data, but to do rapid simulations on that data as well, all in a familiar interface.

Excel can be used to connect to SAP HANA, as we saw in the previous chapter. Using Excel to interact with data in your SAP HANA system means that whenever you open your Excel file, you can update the data and it will always be fresh.

Connecting to Excel requires that the SAP HANA driver for Excel be installed on the PC. This will need to be done on every PC which will connect to SAP HANA, and so in general will be done by your IT department.