Introduction to IBM InfoSphere Streams for Microsoft Excel

Streams for Excel is an add-in for Microsoft Excel 2010 or 2013 that makes streaming data available to business users in Microsoft Excel. As an Excel business user, you can analyze and visualize the streaming data directly in Excel worksheets which gives you more direct control over the data analysis process.

You can focus on analyzing streaming data without having to learn much about InfoSphere® Streams, but there are a few concepts will get you started more quickly:

You work with streaming data that is being processed by an application that is running in InfoSphere Streams. The most readily apparent manifestation of streaming data is that the data you drag into a worksheet from the Streams for Excel task pane continues to change. The data that you see in worksheets is sampled, which means you will see some but not all of the data. Each row of streaming data that you see represents one sample.

Streaming data is made up of smaller parts known as attributes. You can see these attributes when you expand a stream in Streams for Excel. Each attribute has a specific data type and you can work with just some of the attributes rather the entire stream.

You can work with the streaming data in external programs such as Microsoft Excel 2010 or 2013, because the application processing the streams of data in InfoSphere Streams creates a view when it is submitted as a job and starts processing data. This view defines the set of attributes that can appear in a specific data stream that is viewable in Microsoft Excel. If you do not see a stream or the attributes you want to work with, you need to work with your InfoSphere Streams application developer to add a view.