We all have our versions of "Excel Hell" aka spreadsheet defeat. Not to say that Excel and spreadsheets should be replaced, but they can quickly get out of hand. They do a fantastic job for analyzing data in an independant setting, but most of us work in groups and need to collaborate.
Here are the top 5 issues our customers have faced:
1. Different versions of the truth - with distributed copies and analysis, you're either repeating work or missing data and conclusions.
2. Complicated and difficult to verify - Think about the hours you've spent creating pivot tables and graphs to demonstrate a particular point only to find out your data is out of date or a certain formula or macro is incorrect.
3. Massive workbooks - Ever receive a locked 35 page spreadsheet with columns that go out to ZZ and 65 thousand rows? How are you suppose to work with that? You're staring at numbers, not understanding them. Ever try printing such a thing?
4. Transfer of knowledge - To be honest, we all probably store vast amounts of data on personal spreadsheets on our machines. What happens when we're not accessible? Who'll knows what is where? How will the knowledge be transferred?
5. Upgrades and versions compatibility - Quick count, how many of you are still on Office 2003? How many of you have run into the 65,536 row limit? Who's still waiting to be upgraded? Exactly.
Business intelligence tools consolidate data from different sources so that you can start making decisions and understanding your data rather than wasting time formatting reports and spreadsheets. It starts by bringing your data into a single source, and creating custom preformatted views such as sales vs. time, marketing conversions vs. mix, gross revenue vs. profitiblity, etc., so in an instant, you're looking at updated and real-time data.
You can share the data views and allow your co-workers to verify and collaborate rather than emailing multiple versions of spreadsheets around. Review monthly, weekly, daily reports without having to copy and paste from one source to another - and hoping the data is valid. Moreover, with drill down capability, you can go from high-level dashboards charts and graphs, to tabular analysis views where you can sort, filter, slice & dice. One more click and you can go all the way down to the needle-in-the-haystack so you can verify and validate individual data points.
Learn how Matrix for Business can help you do all this and more within a few days - without ever calling in a SQL database developer. Oh, and yes, you can export back to Excel if you really want to.
