Business teams will be able to access trusted and governed data in Snowflake from within Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets

Alation, Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced at Snowflake’s annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2023, the launch of Alation Connected Sheets for Snowflake. This product enables users to access governed, trusted, and up-to-date data in Snowflake directly from Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.

Spreadsheets remain the most popular data analytics tool in use, with 78 million users worldwide¹ using the tool every day. Spreadsheets are also some of the most error-prone analytics tools, as 90% of spreadsheets contain errors due to incorrect or out-of-date data. These data quality issues can have significant negative impacts on the decision-making that such spreadsheets support.

With Alation Connected Sheets for Snowflake, business users can now instantly find, understand, and trust the data they need – without leaving their spreadsheet. This product enables business users to access Snowflake source data directly from the spreadsheets in which they work without the need to understand SQL or rely on central data teams. Alation Connected Sheets also enable data governance teams to set access policies on which users can access various data objects.

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“The Data Team at Lightspeed Systems is working to establish a data-driven culture,” said Brian Truong, Data Platform Manager at Lightspeed Systems. “Part of that culture includes empowering teams across the business to access trusted and secure data directly from the source. With Alation Connected Sheets for Snowflake, both business and technical users can self-serve the data they need and start analyzing it without waiting for a response from the engineers on the Data Team. Being able to instantly retrieve data from one centralized location – our Snowflake data source – and use published queries or tables in spreadsheets with confidence is a productivity game changer for the day-to-day activities of our spreadsheet users.”

“Many of our customers rely on Snowflake as a primary data source,” said Jonathan Bruce, VP of Product Management at Alation. “By strengthening our strategic partnership with Snowflake through Alation Connected Sheets, customers can harness their trusted data within the Data Cloud to better manage and utilize the most pervasive enterprise tool – the spreadsheet. This integration makes governed data in Snowflake accessible to the millions of business users who live in spreadsheets. As a result, Snowflake adoption grows and becomes frictionless.”

Alation Connected Sheets for Snowflake helps users:

• Deliver stronger data governance: Data management teams can set fine-grained policies to manage which users have access to which data sets.
• Democratize access to data: Users can quickly find, select, and filter datasets and SQL queries to import into the spreadsheet – without code, manual data entry, or relying on technical resources.
• Ensure analysis remains up to date: Users can maintain spreadsheet accuracy with automatic-refresh data scheduling.
• Share data connections: Save time by connecting to Snowflake once and allowing the team to refresh reports with the same secure connection; this eliminates redundant query loads and reduces costs.

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