Microsoft wants to put more data into its customer’s hands, and is enhancing some of its Excel connectors to make it happen.

The updates, which include an improved connector for SAP HANA, will allow Microsoft’s customers to gather more data for business intelligence and analytics operations in fewer steps, the company said.

HANA, which is SAP SE’s flagship in-memory analytics platform, has been gaining momentum in recent months, and recently gained the backing of Dell Technologies Inc. when the two firms agreed to partner on an innovation lab that’s designed to help businesses pit their business analytics workloads – up to 30 terabytes – against the software.

“The lab environment for SAP HANA offers our customers the ability to test their current and future SAP applications and benchmark their performance to facilitate rapid adoption within their organization,” said Simon Spence, global director of the Dell SAP division at Dell Services, in an announcement earlier this month.

Not to be left behind, Microsoft has updated its SAP HANA connector to allow the multi-selection of values for variables and parameters. Some of the new HANA on Azure options include multimode deployments with a max. of 32 TB of memory, plus a high-performance virtual machine with 448 GB of memory, 32 cores and over 6.5 TB of SSD storage.

In addition, Microsoft’s Access Database connector for Excel has been updated with a new “Select Related Tables” option that selects all the tables with a direct relation to selected tables. Meanwhile, the OData connector now has a new way of collecting data.

“The OData connector now supports importing Open Type columns from OData feeds. Prior to this update, such columns were not supported in Power Query,” Microsoft’s Excel team wrote in a blog post. “This option is exposed under the Advanced Options section in the OData connector dialog.”

Another new feature allows Query Editor users to access the same page as colleagues who create new Query Steps while working on Excel reports with localized versions of Excel. Query Steps are “data acquisition and transformation” activities that can be performed using the Power Query for Excel plugin or the Get & Transform tool. Before, the software would label Steps such as FilteredRow and SplitColumns according to the user’s language settings. Now, because Excel accesses the regional settings, users can keep the English names, making them more recognizable to all users. Microsoft has also added the ability to make comments or add documentation in the Query Steps dialog.

Finally, Query Editor has been enhanced with new date and time capabilities. The update will allow users to extract Day, Week or Month names from Date/Time columns via the Query editor ribbon.

Microsoft said the new features will be rolled out to Office 365 subscribers on Excel 2016 as an automatic update, while Excel 2010 and 2013 users will need to download the updates manually.

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