I have mentioned Microsoft PowerPivot before. But, I did not have Excel 2010 at the time; now I do. I did not know about the Windows Azure Marketplace back then.
PowerPivot is basically an Excel pivot table on steroids. It is a free add in to Excel. It is a beautiful looking interface, but it does take some time to figure out.
The Windows Azure Marketplace is, well, a market place where publishers of applications and data can sell there wares to people who want to buy those applications and data. There is an Excel add in, also free, which lets you connect to these data sets.
This video what helpful in getting a connection to some free data which is available in the Azure Marketplace, basically letting you experiment with Azure and PowerPivot.
All this stuff is worth checking out.
My question is: When will working with XBRL information be this easy?