For Business Intelligence and Reporting, the Client is Excel

Microsoft recently released Management Reporter 2012 and a lot of people are excited.  The Management Reporter team has been very accessible and they've done an admirable job of tackling questions and promoting the new release. However, I'm stuck on one significant flaw of Management Reporter.  It's not Excel. 

Management Reporter's roots go back to FRx, an iconic product that made it to version 6.7 and THEN accumulated a full dozen service packs. As the default replacement for FRx, Management Reporter has a more robust architecture than FRx and it is finally catching up in terms of its feature set.  There is still plenty of work to be done; including rolling in budgeting and planning capabilities to ultimately replace Forecaster, but those should come eventually.

My primary issue is that FRx was built in a world of "Excel-Like" products in which software companies built interfaces using rows and columns so they could say that it worked like Excel.  Except that nothing works quite like Excel. I still cringe when I see "Excel-like" in marketing literature. Management Reporter expanded on the vision of FRx rather than throwing it out and starting over. The problem with that approach is that in the meantime, the world changed.

Recently, highly respected technology speaker Richard Campbell was discussing SQL Server 2012 data analytics when he commented, "We've given up on building 3rd party clients. The client is Excel."  Richard spends his time in a world much broader than just ERP systems and with