It's not exactly rocket science, and to a true data-head, it's actually a little redundant, but hey, you have to start somewhere!
Confused? We're talking about MIcrosoft Excel taking it's first baby steps in going social.
The good folks over on the Excel Blog just came up with a post about an app on Facebook called Photo Vote, called "Poll Your Friends With Photo Vote" which allows you to create a poll on Facebook. They've also enabled a little bit of Excel integration which allows you to slice the data by demographic variables that Facebook automatically collects.
For example, say you put up a poll about which team is better: The Red Sox or the New York Yankees (personally, I don't see why you'd need a poll for that. The Red Sox, any day. Duh!) and you get 100 friends to vote. Well, you can now see stuff such as:
- Of the grey-matter-challenged friends who did choose to vote for the Yankees, what percentage were female, and what percentage were male
- What was the age distribution of your respondents, broken up by response
- And so on and so forth
Enabling all of this is an app called the Microsoft Excel WebApp, which is the back-end tool that drives all of this analysis. Here's a snapshot of the page from the blog we already linked to:
Now, it's an idea worth trying, but there are a couple of problems with this approach, as far as we're concerned:
- People who are not data-heads don't really care about the analysis in the first place
- Even if you imagine a situation in which they will want to segment the data, they will usually just want to see the results - they don't really care which program is running in the back-end
- For data-heads, this is just a toy
But hey, we don't want to rain on Microsoft Excel's going-social party (not too much, anyhow). So go ahead and give it a try - and tell us what you think.
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