While rumors of an acquisition of Salesforce (CRM) by Microsoft (MSFT) continue to swirl, the two companies continues to work closely together. The latest form of the collaboration is a connector that integrates Microsoft Excel applications into the Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud.

Providers of business intelligence and analytics applications have been making the case for replacing spreadsheets with richer BI applications for years. Most business users, however, a deeply attached to spreadsheet formats they already know how to use.

Rather than replacing those spreadsheets, Anna Rosenman, senior director of product marketing for Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud, said a Salesforce analytics application delivered via the cloud is designed to make it simpler to visualize large amounts of Microsoft Excel data in a way that can be easily shared via the cloud.

For example, Rosenman noted that rather than rolling spreadsheets up into a master file on a local server, organizations can feed all that data into Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud, and then share that data back out to users of Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) using a common set of login credentials.

While the détente that exists between Salesforce and Microsoft harkens back to an integration alliance the two companies formed last year, the integration between Microsoft Excel and Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud represents a tangible use case that solution providers allied with both companies can easily demonstrate business value to customers. As such, Microsoft partners looking to add value around Excel might begin to pull Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud into environments where Microsoft productivity applications have long been the dominant standard.

Of course, there are more than a few providers of Microsoft CRM applications in and out of the cloud that view Salesforce as a rival. But the bulk of Microsoft partners that just sell productivity applications have not committed one way or another when it comes to either CRM and analytics applications in the cloud. Given its current market share in the CRM category Salesforce is betting that when it comes to both area many Microsoft partners will find Salesforce to be the path of least customer resistance.

At the end of the day, Rosenman said that when it comes to cloud applications that battle will be won and lost by which set of vendors provide the best end user application experience. Of course, the key to winning that battle, said Rosenman, is making sure that the integration between different applications running inside and out of the cloud is as seamless as possible.