Dummies - Excel 2007 Dashboards And Reports For Dummies

The term business intelligence (BI), coined by Howard Dresner of the Gartner Group, describes the set of concepts and methods to improve business decision-making by using fact-based support systems. Practically speaking, BI is what you get when you analyze raw data and turn that analysis into knowledge. BI can help an organization identify cost-cutting opportunities, uncover new business opportunities, recognize changing business environments, identify data anomalies, and create widely accessible reports, among other things.

Over the last few years, the BI concept has overtaken corporate executives who are eager to turn impossible amounts of data into knowledge. As a result of this trend, whole industries have been created. Software vendors that focus on BI and dashboarding are coming out of the woodwork. New consulting firms touting their BI knowledge are popping up virtually every week. And even the traditional enterprise solution providers, like Business Objects and SAP, are offering new BI capabilities.

This need for BI has manifested itself in many forms. Most recently, it’s come in the form of dashboard fever. Dashboards are reporting mechanisms that deliver business intelligence in a graphical form.

Maybe you’ve been hit with dashboard fever. Or maybe your manager is hitting you with dashboard fever. Nevertheless, you’re probably holding this book because you’re being asked to create BI solutions (that is, dashboards) in Excel.

Although many IT (information technology) managers would scoff at the thought of using Excel as a BI tool, Excel is inherently part of the enterprise BI tool portfolio. Whether IT managers are keen to acknowledge it, most of the data analysis and reporting done in business today is done by using spreadsheets. Here are several significant reasons to use Excel as the platform for your dashboards and reports:
+ Tool familiarity: If you work in corporate America, you’re conversant in the language of Excel. You can send even the most seasoned of senior vice presidents an Excel-based reporting tool and trust he’ll know what to do with it. With an Excel reporting process, your users spend less time figuring how to use the tool and more time looking at the data.
+ Built-in flexibility: With most enterprise dashboarding solutions, the capability to perform analyses outside the predefined views is either disabled or unavailable. How many times have you dumped enterprise-level data into Excel so you can analyze it yourself? I know I have. You can bet that if you give users an inflexible reporting mechanism, they’ll do what it takes to create their own usable reports. In Excel, features, such as pivot tables, autofilters, and Form controls allow you to create mechanisms that don’t lock your audience into one view. And because you can have multiple worksheets in one workbook, you can give them space to do their own side analysis as needed.
+ Rapid development: Building your own reporting capabilities in Excel can liberate you from the IT department’s resources and time limitations. With Excel, not only can you develop reporting mechanisms faster, but you have the flexibility to adapt more quickly to changing requirements.
+ Powerful data connectivity and automation capabilities: Excel isn’t the toy application some IT managers make it out to be. With its own native programming language and its robust object model, Excel can be used to automate processes and even connect to various data sources. With a few advanced techniques, you can make Excel a hands-off reporting mechanism that practically runs on its own.
+ Little to no incremental costs: Not all of us can work for multi-billion dollar companies that can afford enterprise-level reporting solutions. In most companies, funding for new computers and servers is limited, let alone funding for expensive BI reporting packages. For those companies, leveraging Microsoft Office is frankly the most cost-effective way to deliver key business reporting tools without compromising too deeply on usability and functionality.

All that being said, so many reporting functions and tools are in Excel that it’s difficult to know where to start. Enter your humble author, spirited into your hands via this book. Here, I show you how you can turn Excel into your own personal BI tool. With a few fundamentals and some of the new BI functionality Microsoft has included in this latest version of Excel, you can go from reporting data with simple tables to creating a meaningful reporting component that’s sure to wow management.