What tools exist to visualize data in Microsoft Excel?

Whenever you're dealing with large amounts of data, Excel will have its limits. You may have heard of Business Intelligence, I work for http://www.bimeanalytics.com/, which is for querying multiple data sources, even blending them together into understandable dashboards. This allows you to visualize data, even if it's terabytes of it, in just a glance.

Our Slice application (http://about.juiceslice.com/) is specifically designed to help people take their existing Excel data and create interactive dashboards and reports. We've focused on making it easy for people to present their data in ways that clear, engaging, and flexible.

I looked around for some useful information on our site, IT Central Station, and was able to find a few helpful reviews that may help answer your question. One user who uses Tableau wrote the following: "I'm able to prototype charts/dashboards in hours vs days or weeks with other tools (mainly Excel). Doesn't require me to think about the level of aggregation that I'm going to need as it deals with large data sets. Blends disparate datasets together which is awesome for plan vs actual reports where the data is a two different levels of granularity." http://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/tableau-review-by-jonathan-friesen?aid=quora Another reviewer who uses Windward for his reporting writes that "The ability to design reports, using all the formatting bells and whistles, in Microsoft Word and Excel. Plus the ability to combine XML data and SQL data." Read his full review here: http://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/windward-review-by-paul-schneider?aid=quora Good luck with your query!

Use esCalc, (http://www.raqsoft.com/higher-efficient-spreadsheet-for-business-computation), it can retrieve Excel data, calculate and then export to Excel files or other formats you need as well.

We've got a bi-directional excel client at Anametrix which can upload from excel tables, change visualizations on the fly and then export back. Also can take large amounts of data from various sources push to a report in our UI and then back out to excel. Have to be a client to use, but it's an option.

Have you already tried PivotTables and PivotCharts? These are the built in solution for exploring and visualizing data in an exploratory way.

Depending on your definition of "large", and/or your ability to partition into smaller chunks, I would start with Microsoft's PowerPivot. Client version is free.