14 DAY TRIAL // With social networks becoming an increasingly relevant source of data, a new free tool from Microsoft allows Office users to explore Twitter right in Excel.
The Microsoft Analytics for Twitter add-in is currently live on the Microsoft Download Center, and up for grabs free of charge.
The add-in delivers just what its official label promises, a way to easily crawl Twitter data and have the results displayed as user friendly statistics inside of Excel.
The software giant stresses that the Analytics for Twitter add-in is designed to work only on top of Office Excel 2010
“Microsoft Analytics for Twitter allows users to query Twitter (i.e. Tweeters, #hashtags, @mentions & keywords) and get dashboard views on Twitter statistics inside Microsoft® Office Excel 2010,” the Redmond company said.
Once it has been deployed on a machine, users will be able to access Analytics for Twitter as the "Microsoft Analytics for Twitter.xlsx," generally via the desktop.
However, simply having Excel 2010 is not enough, with customers also being required to run another resource from the company, namely Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010.
Microsoft revealed that “with this FREE add-in, you can:
• Perform up to 5 parallel Twitter Searches (limited to 1500 results per query per day).
• Drive ad-hoc analysis of tweets by day, by hour, by tweeters, by #hashtags and @mentions.
• Customize your views (using slicers, DAX formulas or reference tables).”
There are some limitations that users must take into account when leveraging the Analytics for Twitter Office Excel 2010 add-in, namely that in addition to only being able to query 1,500 tweets per day they will also only be permitted to search data that is no older than 4 to 7 days.
“Please note that Microsoft Analytics for Twitter takes advantage of Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/). During periods of high traffic volume Twitter Search does not always return search results. Please be patient and try your search again,” the software giant added.
Microsoft Analytics for Twitter Office Excel 2010 add-in is available for download here.
PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010 - RTM is available for download here.