As part of a calculated strategy to take on Microsoft’s powerful Office products suite, Google has partnered with a business intelligence (BI) firm to develop software as a service (Saas) analytics, reporting and a data visualisation tool for its free Google Docs applications suites.

The partnership with Panorama Software is, in particular, seen as an attack on Microsoft Excel and follows the introduction of Gadgets-in-Docs: the ability to embed different gadgets in a spreadsheet.

Panorama’s analytic for Google Docs aims to smarten up Google’s desktop applications, in the same way it has done for Microsoft Office 2007, in order to push it into the hands of more corporate users.