Microsoft’s new Pivot software explores large sets of data, presenting it intuitively in the form of a collection of images accompanied by textual data to allow for seeing it in a broader context.

The technology at the core of Pivot is Microsoft’s Seadragon, software designed for manipulating large quantities of visual information. It allows commodity hardware to rapidly move through vast collections of graphics, zooming in seamlessly without having to wait for information to load, and zooming out to view hundreds or thousands of images at once.

To allow users to make their own collections, Microsoft has released an add-in for Microsoft Excel, called the Pivot Collection Tool, that lets users do this without requiring knowledge of XML.

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