Microsoft Office presents some interesting support for basic planning and data entry for organizations. Planning and data entry scenarios relate to the capture of data that does not usually exist in line-of-business (LOB) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software applications and include the following:

• – Data that relates to forward views (plans, budgets and forecasts) for an organization
• – Ad hoc data that is prepared and captured manually

For many years now Microsoft Excel was used extensively by Information Workers to support both the previous requirements together with more sophisticated and complex business modeling activities.