For a company that until not long ago used “the end of software” as its mission statement, Salesforce.com Inc. is taking great efforts to accommodate users of traditional on-premise applications on its cloud platform. The latest milestone in that push is the introduction of a new free analytics connector for Excel.

The integration is the fruit of a partnership with Microsoft Corp., a once bitter rival often seen as the poster child of the legacy software world that Salesforce set out to disrupt. The two giants still compete in many areas, including customer relationship management (CRM) segment where the cloud provider makes most of its revenue, but have set aside their rivalry for the sake of mutual benefit.

That’s the same motivation that drove Oracle, another sworn competitor with deep on-premise roots​, to strike a similar partnership with Salesforce aimed at enabling simpler interoperability among their respective products. It’s no coincidence that the database giant and Microsoft are cozying up to the company at a time when they’re both trying to shift from selling on-premise software licenses to subscription services.

With more than two million users around the world, Salesforce is a force to be reckoned with in the public cloud that a vendor trying to target business workers simply can’t afford to afford, even if it happens to be a competitor. That’s why Redmond ultimately gave its blessings to the new Salesforce Wave Connector App for Excel, which provides a convenient way to turn data from spreadsheets into graphs and reports.

The CRM giant says that the visualization capabilities of its service allow everyday users to perform advanced operations such as mapping out trends across data points and predicting changes that would otherwise require deep familiarity with Excel. Wave also packs collaboration features that offer a simpler alternative to emailing spreadsheets around, convenience that becomes especially pronounced in large enterprise settings where upwards of hundreds of people may need to access a particular report and the subsequent updates.

The functionality makes Excel that much more competitive against modern business intelligence tools from the likes of Qlik Software, Inc., which introduced a similar collaboration service for sharing visualizations only yesterday, that are increasingly taking its place in enterprise users’ workflow. Salesforce, meanwhile, gains more external support for Wave, a relatively new addition of its cloud platform that has yet to reach the same popularity as some of the more established components.

The connector is available through the Office Store for both the on-premise and hosted version of Excel.