What are Excel 2013's new Power View and PowerMap (aka "GeoFlow") features?

Excel 2013 contains a great new feature called Power View together with a worth-coming feature called PowerMap (previously, this was the codename GeoFlow) that allows you to display information on a map.

Shortly put, these features takes a set of data with location information, and plots that data over an interactive Bing Maps chart directly inside Excel. What's more, you are given an interactive "control panel" over the map, and this allows you to change parameters on the fly. For instance, you can control the color and size of the points displayed, and also make then clickable to display detailed data.

This all is very good, and works well with SQL Server databases, too. Especially, if you are using those geo-enabled data types storing latitude and longitude coordinates. But luckily, written addresses (as in customer records) will also do just fine as Power View and PowerMap can convert addresses to map locations (this works best in the U.S.).

For more information, check out this Office.com topic. You can download PowerMap preview here.