[jameshart]

It's all just pivot tables, in the end. Excel solved most data slicing/drilldown problems years ago. Only issue has always been data size limits and access to live, up to data data (though Excel's also been able to hit external OLAP services for data for a long time too).

[6stringmerc]

I'd like to affirm your claim that Pivot Tables and Excel can match pretty much any BI related inquiry where data is available. Caveat - the data will fit in Excel

Source: Experience in Wall Street, Fortune 500 risk management, and dumping stuff from SalesForce to make it useable beyond what our implementation would report (or what leadership could get it to do).

[caractacus]

And the data size limit is excel is stifling. 1m maximum rows? That can get filled very quickly.

[mistermann]

With Power Pivot it's quite a bit better, this guy did 122 million rows:

http://www.microsofttrends.com/2014/02/09/how-much-data-can-...

If that's not enough you can do SSAS Tabular + DirectQuery (although to be fair, that's no longer "pure Excel", but an end user likely doesn't care):

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh230898.aspx