I’ll just come out with it: you should share PDF files, not Excel files when distributing dashboard reports.

Sacrilege! Say it isn’t so! I know, this is pretty odd advice coming from someone who professes that Excel is one of the best tools available. But there are times when you have to remember that your focus is providing and distributing the information, not the vehicle that your audience uses to view information. It pains me to say it, but they don’t care how efficient your formulas are, or what controls or tricks you employed in Excel to develop the report that they’re inspecting.

Efficiencies in Excel spreadsheet development are important, and that has been discussed to no end on the Internet, this site included. But all of that becomes completely irrelevant when you remove 100% of the recalculation time for your real end users by providing the final charts, metrics, and calculations to them as printed pages.

These days when you distribute PDF files to your report readers, you empower them to be able to take your beautiful works of art with them everywhere they go on their smart phones, albeit at the cost of interactivity. I’m confident that it’s a trade-off they’ll gladly accept. Even better, you don’t have to spend time teaching them how to use your file, nor spend time building in safeguards and usability enhancements, outside of what you want for yourself and the core functionality of the document, that is.

After all, for every Excel user that as comfortable with it as you are, there’s at least one other in that same office or company that always seems to need help regardless of how easy to use you thought that you’d made it. You know it and I know it. That’s the reality and unfortunately it’s not likely to change any time soon. When you make it easy for them (by eliminating Excel altogether in this case) you make it easy for yourself too.

There are a number of additional benefits that distributing a PDF file offers you:

1. The presentation of your dashboard style report will be pixel perfect.
2. The readers won’t be able to accidentally alter the data or otherwise corrupt the workbook.
3. While there are a number of techniques to keep the file size down (and thus increase the performance) of Excel dashboard report files, they’ll never compare in size to the amount of analysis that you can pack into a PDF file that’s just a few megabytes in size.

Color Code Different Sections

At one time my group distributed a printed and spiral bound monthly financial analysis package to each manager of the various operations groups and other business leaders. To separate the different sections within the document, tabbed cardboard dividers were used. To cut costs for both materials and preparation labor, and to save on our environmental impact, I proposed that we color code reports for different departments, product lines or other important topics. This will allowed users to instantly know when they were looking at the correct section of the document for their numbers, and the dividers were no longer necessary.

Personally, I prefer a very minimalist color scheme for dashboard reporting: black, shades of grey and a splash of red when required, like this. But many prefer the style that Charley Kyd promotes. At the time, my audience preferred the latter, so I took advantage of it.

When reporting for different business lines, I used VBA code to change the color of the elements on the page: the title area, the charts, the tables. Excel is much more flexible now with its available color choices than when I was building my first dashboard reports with Excel 2003, but that’s a bit of a double edged sword. Making choices can a terrible distraction. Pick a few basic color combinations and get on with it.

I’m no graphic designer, so here’s what I did to achieve what I considered to be a professional result: I plagiarized. Well, not exactly plagiarized, but rather sought inspiration from experts. I knew that design experts are often hired for their assistance in preparing the annual reports for large public companies, so I spent a bit of time downloading some sample reports from the larger companies, looking for combinations that I liked and that I could emulate rather well with my Excel dashboard. So in essence I got expert advice for free!

As to the specific VBA code, preparing that wasn’t overly difficult either, as I used the macro recorder to have much of the code generated for me by Excel and then I modified only certain aspects of that generated code to suit my purposes. I’m confident that you’ll have no trouble handling that.

Automate with PDF Production with VBA

As I said earlier, my first “real” dashboard reporting systems were built with Excel 2003, and I must say that I had a heck of a time developing the required code to produce PDF files back then. The only thing that enabled me to do it was that I also had Adobe Acrobat installed on my system, and after an inordinate amount of online research, a ridiculous amount of hours to be honest, I finally determined how to automate the Adobe Distiller program. It might have been easy if my company had permitted me to register as a developer with Adobe but the cost was viewed as prohibitive.

Luckily for you, these days you won’t need to go through any of that.

You see as of Excel 2007 (SP2 I think), and now in Excel 2010, you can now produce PDF files with as little as a single line of VBA code:

This singular ability enables you to easily generate all of the benefits discussed earlier. What does that line do? It prints the active worksheet, as you’ve defined the printed area to be, to a good quality PDF file. You can easily change the file name and location. In fact, that’s key to your new reporting system.

It might take you a bit of work to develop a full PDF creation routine that expands on that single line, but it’ll be well worth it. Then when you click a “Make PDF File” button, your program will begin stepping through all of your important data points, recalculating the dashboard, and then preparing a PDF file for that data point. Then it will move on to the next data point and repeat the process until it has created a PDF file for each data point.

Meet the PDF Toolkit (PDFTK)

If you haven’t heard of it before, allow me to introduce you to an absolutely indispensable tool for those who don’t have high end PDF software like Adobe Acrobat: PDF Toolkit (PDFTK). Heck even Acrobat users can make good use of this one.

PDFTK is a utility that lets you do practically anything that you’ll ever need to do with PDF files: merge, split, rotate, and more. It’s free, and you don’t need Acrobat to be able to use it.

Download and install PDFTK now.

Make the work easier to repeat

My favorite approach to PDFTK, given my inclination towards batch files, is to script it on the command line (see examples). Of course, it’s easy to incorporate any of that into some VBA code too.

Now, seeing as you’re still with me, I’m going to reward you by doing something silly and literally give away a bunch of valuable program code. It still needs some details to be filled in, but the skeleton should help immensely.

Clearly, this is a simplified shell of an example but it shouldn’t be too difficult, especially with a good VBA book on your desk such as Excel 2010 Power Programming with VBA (Mr. Spreadsheet’s Bookshelf), to make it work for your specific needs.

Your raw data might have originated in report files, Excel tables, Access databases, other database formats, or even PDF files, but you persevered and created models that allowed you to capture and manage that data, and create summaries in formats that may never have been previously envisioned to help you and your group to gain new insights into your operations. Then you used the skills that you learned in developing Excel dashboard reports to present that data visually in ways that let you easily control the included data.

Even if you opt to forgo the convenience and speed that VBA programming can bring to your project, distributing the final results of your efforts with PDF files will demonstrate to your entire group that, in no uncertain terms, you excel with Monarch.

Worldwide Quantity Shipments

Recently, I looked at how Monarch builds range names when exporting to Excel, and then some examples of how we can use those range names in Excel functions. Today we’ll look at the process of having Monarch create an Excel dashboard report workbook and how we can begin to easily add dramatic functionality to that workbook.

1. Build the required summaries

Again, for this demonstration I’m using the supplied sample reports as the data source (with permission from Datawatch). I have a few “secrets” for building summaries that will be used for the purpose of building Excel dashboard reports, including:

• Don’t use subtotals for the key fields. They’re not necessary for the purpose of developing dashboard style reporting.
• Don’t suppress duplicate key field values. For many reasons, we want each row to behave like a regular database record, with values in each key field.
• Limit the summary to very few measure values. Often one measure field is sufficient.
• Limit the number of key fields whenever possible. We’re after a simple, easy to query layout and multiple key fields adds to the overall size of the Excel file unnecessarily, and excessive or redundant data will negatively impact the speed and performance of the file.
• Never set a summary to use the “default filter”. You want to be absolutely certain of the data that you’re funnelling into the Excel file, and remember that Monarch will use the currently active filter in the Table as the “default filter” for that summary.
• Include grand totals only when necessary. Further, always use the same wording for the grand totals. By using the same wording, one Excel formula will be able to extract the total amounts for any summary.
• Name the summaries as descriptively as possible. You’ll probably have quite a few of them and it helps immensely to know the content just by the name. Short names are convenient to work with, but have limited usefulness.
• Build one field summaries. Summaries consisting of only a single key field, while seemingly simplistic and of no analytic use, are absolutely critical to building useful dashboard report systems.

Worldwide Shipping Revenues

Customer Shipments

Customer Revenues

Media List

Customer List

Country List

Top 10 Customer Revenues

Top Revenue Products

Top Revenue Products by Country

2. Create the Excel Workbook

Since this will likely be a process that we’ll repeat on a regular basis to update the file with current data, we’ll create a project export in Monarch. For all of the specific Monarch work here I’ll be referencing Monarch v10, though the process will be similar if not identical for all versions.

Define a new project export. Name it All Summaries, and choose to export summaries. From the Summary Name list, select the “All summaries” item. Elect to use Automatic Naming by tables, not files. Do not apply any additional filtering to the export process at this stage.

Now this next part of the project export definition process is really important: supply a file name using the “.xlsm” extension, not the “.xlsx” extension. This is because you’re going to add one single critical line of Visual Basic program code to the file (more if you’re up to it) and you cannot add that to an “.xlsx” file. I’ll supply that code later.

Typically when we export from Monarch to Excel files, especially reused files, it’s very common to overwrite the previously exported Excel file with a new export, but we don’t want to do that when developing dashboard report files. Instead indicate that you want to add data to the file. It’s only when specifying what you want Monarch to do with the individual tables that get created in the Excel file that you want to select the overwrite option.

Finally, to create the fastest, most responsive Excel file, do not add any further features to the exported tables such as titles, outlines, or formulas.

Run the project export to create your new dashboard report Excel file.

3. Add devices to facilitate dashboard report development.

First up is a little bit of housekeeping that is required due to a bit of a bug in Monarch Excel file creation process. When Excel files that Monarch updates are opened, Excel often requires that you force a manual recalculation. You can doing this simply by pressing the F9 function key, but it’s easy to overlook and that can cause problems. So we’ll add a line of program code to have Excel recalculate the workbook immediately when you open it.

In Excel, hold down Alt and hit F11. This will open Excel’s development window. You should see the current file listed sheet name by sheet name in the left side of the window in a Project window. Double click the item for the ThisWorkbook item. Now at the top of the window, you’ll see a drop down list with a (General) label. Select the Workbook item from this list. Note that Excel automatically creates a new subroutine for you:

To that add a single line of code:

Excel Workbook Open Event

Close the programming window and return to your Excel workbook.

For our dashboard report of the Classical Music Distributors data, we want to be able to spotlight data for activity in specific countries, media types, and customers. To do that, we’ll add drop down lists for each of those data items to the dashboard. The values for each of those lists will be automatically populated by our Monarch exports, but the lists need a little help to get exactly the right data into them. Let’s tackle the countries item first.

Go to the Country_List sheet, and define a new range name. Name the range “Countries”, and assign it the formula “=OFFSET(Country_List!$A$2,0,0,COUNTA(Country_List!$A:$A),1)”. With this formula, “Countries” will refer to every country name in the list, avoiding the field name in the first row. Because we often want the values in the heading row, we don’t have the luxury of exporting not including the field names in only selected sheets, but using this approach it’s easy to skip the heading.

Use the same approach to create range names for “Customers” (“=OFFSET(Customer_List!$A$2,0,0,COUNTA(Customer_List!$A:$A),1)”) and “Media” (“=OFFSET(Media_List!$A$2,0,0,COUNTA(Media_List!$A:$A),1)”).

Now we can add a new blank worksheet into the file. Rename the sheet to something more descriptive.

To quickly see how our new range names are behaving, add a data validation rule to a cell. Select “List” from the Allow list, and set the Source box to =Customers. Note that you must include the equals sign otherwise you’ll see only the text “Customers” in your drop down list. While this works well, there is a drawback to using the data validation list approach in that the font size of the list items can get a little small and hard to read depending upon the screen resolution. There’s a better mechanism available, but we’ll save that for later.

The attentive will have noticed that our range names are each returning one extra row with a blank value. This will become apparent later when we look at how the selected values are used to display information in the dashboard.

We’ve made some good progress on a dashboard reporting system today. To learn more details of how to build these types of reporting systems, be sure to pick up a copy of “Dashboard Reporting with Excel”. I’m positive that as you read it you’ll envision plenty of new ways to excel with Monarch.

In the previous post, The Secret is in the Names, I wrote about how Monarch populates Excel files with useful named ranges when exporting data. Today we’ll look at how we can capitalize on those named ranges with specific Excel functions.

In that previous post, the first point regarding the range names is that Monarch creates all of its names with an underscore if it needs to replace any space characters in our summary names. We’ll keep that in mind as we proceed.

One of the things that I like to utilize when building Monarch summaries is setting a key field to display its values across the top of the summary above the measure values, instead of down the left side of the measure values. This is particularly useful when working with dates or quarters, such as “12/1/2012”, “Dec-2012”, or Q4-FY12.

When working with a number of summaries, even across multiple models, I like to stick to the same title formatting. Plan ahead, and decide upon the time period (calendar months, fiscal periods, quarterly, what have you) that you’ll be using for reporting values. The reason for this will become even more apparent later when we look at using specific values in that selection of titles in individual Excel formulas.

For demonstration purposes, I’ll refer to the sample report files that are included when Monarch is installed, specifically the Classical Music Distributor reports, ClassJan.prn, ClassFeb.prn, ClassMar.prn and Classic.prn (which has April data). Datawatch has graciously given me permission to use those files for demonstration purposes here at ExcelWithMonarch.com

Each report has date on which the customer’s order was shipped, but we’ll choose to report shipments by calendar month. For simplicity we’ll present the date as m/d/yyyy, using the first of the month in each case. To get the Period field, we’ll build a calculated Date type field with this expression:

This will give us 1/1/2008, 2/1/2008, and so on. As mentioned, these become the column headings in the summaries that will be prepared.

Later, when we want to determine which column in the worksheet contains the February values, which we built another named range for called Reporting_Period, we can use a formula similar to:

and if the February date is in column D on the worksheet that Monarch exported, then the formula will return a value of four, meaning that the February date was found in the fourth position. This is immensely useful. The zero value at the end tells to Excel to find the exact search value.

Look at that MATCH() function again. It’s simple and easy to read/review, but there’s some else very convenient about it as well. What do we need to change if we want to use that formula to refer to a different worksheet? Correct: only the worksheet name.

As easy as that is to build, we can make it just a little bit easier to build a whole collection of similar formulas that refer to many worksheets. Since we’ll probably have quite a number of summaries in our models, we’ll also have a number of exported worksheets to help in our analysis of the data. While we could just revise the sheet name in each formula, there’s an even easier way: have Excel build a portion of the formula for us! OK, now you’re thinking, “What is he talking about?” We’ll use Excel’s INDIRECT() function. It works like this:

• Type the exact name of the exported worksheet in a cell, say A8.
• Now in cell D8, the formula becomes:
  • =MATCH(Reporting_Period,INDIRECT($C10&”!Print_Titles”),0)

Great, now we know how to find the proper column for a certain period, when the values go from left to right across the worksheet. But MATCH() also works nicely for vertical lists. That means that we can find where the first occurrence of “Big Shanty Music” is in a previously sorted list of customers, where the customer name was the first down key field in a summary. In cell B10, that would look something like this:

Since we know that the customer name is the first column, we can tell Excel to look in the entire column for our search name. Yes, for the Excel-knowledgeable this is a little inefficient, and there are other ways, but this works very well when the data in your Excel file isn’t too large (and these Excel files typically aren’t too large when exporting Monarch summaries – after all, that’s why we summarize with Monarch: to shelter us from vast amounts of data).

Great, now we know how to get a column number and a row number. “But Sandy, why do I care?” you ask.

Getting the row and column numbers makes the whole thing come together and you can practically hear your data make the beautiful sounds of a full symphony. All that we need now is one more Excel function, and it takes full advantage of one last Monarch exploit. Remember the third point in the Monarch secrets? Monarch creates a named range for the entire summary data table for each exported worksheet.

When we put together a cell that gives us a row number for “Big Shanty Music” (in B10), and another that calculates the column number for February 2008 (in D8), then we can use Excel’s INDEX() function in cell D10 to tell us what the value is for Big Shanty Music in February 2008, like this:

Short, clear, and lightning-quick. Formulas with the INDEX() function calculate much more quickly than the often used VLOOKUP() function. Even better, as Monarch users we can take advantage of Monarch practically handing all of the building blocks to us on a silver platter.

You can learn much more about what to do with these Excel functions that can capitalize on your Monarch data by reading the excellent eBook “Dashboard Reporting with Excel” by Microsoft Excel MVP Charley Kyd.

I’ve prepared a little demonstration of an Excel dashboard report using some of Charley’s techniques, and some of my own favorites too of course, with the Classical Music Distributors sample report data. We’ll have a look at that next time. For now though, if you can spend a few minutes getting accustomed to these functions then you’re bound to dream up your own ways to excel with Monarch.

P.S.: Don’t forget that the “30 Days to Become a Better Monarch Modeler” training package, which details my initial experience with Charley’s book, is only available at the reduced price until March 31^st. Get your copy today!

photo credit: chrisbb@prodigy.net

We all know that Monarch can export to wide range of file formats, and that here the local favorite for Monarch exports is clearly Excel files. But do you know the three secret things Monarch does when it creates those Excel files that we can always easily exploit when working with that data in Excel?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s in the names.

Restricted Spaces

When you tell Monarch what you want to name the tables (worksheets) within the Excel file that you’re about to export to, it will create the worksheet in the Excel file with underscore characters instead of spaces. Monarch v9 will allow you to specify a name like “No Spaces”, and it will produce the worksheet named No_Spaces. Monarch v10 however will complain loudly when you tell it to create “No Spaces”, with a nasty “Illegal name syntax” error. As much as I’ve complained to the Datawatch development team about such messages in the product that were clearly designed by programmers for programmers, a few of them still seem to persist. Honestly, would it have been that difficult to actually tell the user that spaces in the table name cannot be used? Or silently convert spaces to underscores as was done in v9? And I still don’t know how v11 reacts.

This is fairly obvious when you manually export from the Table window, but it may not be when you create project exports, especially where summaries are concerned. This is because spaces are perfectly acceptable in summary names. Just remember that Monarch will convert all of those spaces into underscores when it exports to Excel worksheets. Same goes for any worksheets named after key values, if you’re exporting to new worksheets based on the key field values in a summary.

Nonetheless, forcing names without spaces is a good thing, because it simplifies the development of formulas that reference cells or areas on other worksheets. For instance, the formula that you create in cell B10 on the worksheet named “Chart_Data” is =Customer_Sales!A2 it’s very easy to read. Perhaps that’s a fairly simple example, but when your formula references multiple sheet names (meaningful) brevity is wonderful.

Easy Printing

Another step that Monarch does for us automatically for every exported worksheet is that it defines the first row as a repeating row in the worksheet’s print titles, when you choose to output field names as the first row. This actually triggers a second automatic event: Excel automatically creates a new range name for the print title row, conveniently named Print_Titles.

Home on the Range

Lastly, Monarch creates another custom range name for the data that is contained on the exported sheet, and it names it exactly the same as the worksheet name. So if the last populated cell on our “No_Spaces” worksheet is G150, the formula for the range name “No_Spaces” will be “=No_Spaces!$A$1:$G$150”.

This brings up another point. If the first row of this worksheet is deleted manually, then the range name will essentially break, and it’s formula will change to “=No_Spaces!#REF!”. No big deal, right? You’ve got the data that you want anyway. Wrong.

Because the range name is not working properly, Monarch will not be able to export to this worksheet. Future Monarch exports will fail, and the only error message that you’ll see from Monarch will be “Export failed” when you run the export manually. This is particularly disastrous if you’re running Monarch from a batch file and don’t see the failure notice. You’ll assume that everything went fine, when in fact your file will be populated with old, potentially misleading data. There’s no way to programmatically check for such errors when running Monarch batch files.

In Summary

So what do we now know about what’s happening behind the scenes in our export Excel files? Three things:

1)      All exported worksheets names have underscores where there may have been spaces in Monarch.

2)      Every exported worksheet will have a range name called Print_Titles that refers to the first row of the data set.

3)      You can refer to your exact data range exported by using the range name named after the worksheet exported.

Now that we know some hidden secrets, the question becomes: What can we do with this information?

That’s a topic for another day, and another way to excel with Monarch.

photo credit: See-ming Lee SML

Monarch’s forte is in not only capturing the data that’s locked in static report, but in allowing us to easily add vital information to that data, and to easily create different views of the data and share those views.

Just as you can do in Excel, Monarch allows you to create new calculations based on the existing data. It also allows for connecting related data to the report data that is being captured by your model using facilities known as internal and external lookups.

Many Monarch users know that there are many tools at their disposal within the program to build new ways to analyze and think about their data, but the truth is that we all get a little complacent and comfortable from time to time, doing the same things and using the same tried and true approaches to solve different problems.

Let’s have a little fun and shake things up today.

When was the last time that you did something for the first time?

I’ll guess that one of the things that you’ve never done would be creating your own program using Excel’s integrated development environment, or IDE. This Excel feature lets you create your own customized solutions for performing repetitive steps very easily. You can write little programs – you may have heard referred to as “macros” – that are just a few lines, say to insert your favorite heading into a worksheet and format it just the way that you like, or longer programs that perform a large number of steps. You do this with a programming language called “Visual Basic for Applications”, or more commonly referred to as VBA.

One of the nice things that you can do with a little Excel programming is having your Monarch work done for you. You’ll click a single button in Excel and it’ll take over and start up Monarch, load a report or two, apply a model that you’ve already built and tested, and then maybe apply a filter to the table data and export that specific data to a file. Now apply a different filter and export that data to another file. Finally, you can have Monarch export a summary or two (or more) for you. And all of this will happen with you clicking a single button in Monarch.

You may know that you can also automate Monarch using batch files, but that method has a number of limitations, notably the inability to set filters dynamically or apply custom sort orders via the command line.

Datawatch kindly documented all of these programming tricks in a “Programmer’s Guide”, but personally I find it a bit too technical for the regular Monarch user. After all, wasn’t Monarch developed in the first place to basically shield the person using from all of the technical stuff?

With that I mind, I set out to make it as easy for you to program Monarch as possible. Readers who subscribe to the free FeedBurner service, which sends you ExcelWithMonarch.com content by email, receive my custom Monarch programming tool. The tool runs in Excel and you can learn more about it here.

Watch this video in full-screen mode to get an idea of what it takes to accomplish this sort of automation:

Now, that doesn’t look too terribly difficult now does it? Trust me: you CAN do this.

Beats Workin’

We all enjoy working with Monarch; it’s a terrific product. But sometimes the routine tasks get monotonous, and highly detailed and meticulous work and processes can be very stressful as there’s usually a fair bit of pressure to make sure that you get the end result right. Every time.

Do yourself a huge favor and devote some time and effort to develop what might be completely new skills. Nobody expects you to be able to create a huge reporting system for your first programming project. Start small. Pick something that you can do fairly quickly with Monarch, and try to reproduce those steps with your own custom Excel program.

There will be a bit of a learning curve, but take the time to learn the basics and build from there. Google is your friend for learning VBA. And you can’t go wrong with having a good book or two on your desk.

Then when you’re a bit more comfortable, start working on a larger project. There’s nothing better than watching your program do your work for you, say, while you’re sitting back enjoying your morning coffee.

We’re not quite to the point of having a robot do our work for us, but by automating your work in this way you can easily share your new versions of the truth with others in your group and it’s the best way to excel with Monarch.

photo credit: Steve Keys

Have you seen some of what is soon to be available in the upcoming release of Excel 2010? Microsoft has produced some videos to demonstrate the new abilities of the software.

But before I share those with you, I thought that I’d include their “History of Business Intelligence”. While a little lengthy, it’s cute, entertaining and informative, and is a pretty good recap of what’s happened with this topic to date. Watch the video to see how the Terminator, Donkey Kong and gophers played a role in getting us to where we’re at today.

History of Business Intelligence

Sparklines

Sparklines are small charts that help convey trends. Many Excel users have been taking advantage of sparklines by using tools such as BonaVista System’s excellent Microcharts (UPDATE March 2012: BonaVista Systems has closed due to the sad and untimely passing of its owner), but Microsoft has addressed this need and deficiency in their software by incorporating this visual analysis tool into Excel 2010.

Slicers

Other products such as Tableau have been making it easy to dynamically filter the data included in tables and charts for a while, and slicers are Microsoft’s version of more interactive filtering. Up until now we’ve been able to filter content with Autofilters and pivot table page fields, but the major improvement offered by the new slicers is in how the secondary filter levels change dynamically based on the initial selection. Have a look:

The Impact of Excel 2010 on Monarch Modelers

Monarch v10′s ability to export summaries, especially when using key values to create individuals worksheets, in conjunction with sparklines will make quick work of producing really useful trend charts in small spaces, maximizing the impact of your dashboard reports.

As Monarch modelers and solution builders, depending upon the requirements of the audience, we might be able to spend less time modeling – building fewer filters up front (in the model) – and instead take advantage of the large storage capacity of Excel (and Access) and have the end users filter their data on their own. Using slicers seems to be pretty straightforward, though your Excel users, at least initially, might appreciate your setting up the worksheet so that they can just click.

Based on how Monarch works with Excel 2007, I’ll assume (I know, I know… yes, I am speculating here) that being able to export data from Monarch to Excel 2010 files will be just as straightforward as it is with Excel 2007 and that we’ll be able to export pivot tables and take full advantage of slicers and sparklines, and the other new features that await us in Excel 2010.

Monarch and Excel Continue Working Together

As long as Excel needs structured data to analyze, then Monarch will always be the tool of choice to:

• organize unstructured data,
• consolidate data from multiple sources, and
• make that data accessible to Excel, either directly or indirectly.

Have you used the Excel 2010 beta software? If so, what were your impressions? I’m interested, clearly, but decided to focus on other tasks rather than test beta software. Nonetheless, by the looks of it, Excel 2010 will open up even more ways for us to excel with Monarch.

photo credit: fotographix.ca

With its unique abilities and affordability, Monarch software is well placed to assist those working in the healthcare industry, an area in which I must say that I don’t have much firsthand experience. But while information is information, and data is data, and I hope that much of what is available here is both useful and applicable, there’s a certain something about having direct involvement in an industry.

photo credit: Edgar Zuniga Jr.

On that note, I’m very pleased to welcome Mr. Joe Berry as a guest contributor! Joe’s entire career has been spent in the business offices of hospitals, and he now shares his knowledge and expertise by providing consulting services to his hospital clients.

Please join me in welcoming Joe to the site, and enjoy his story, which I’ve titled…

Seeding Information Solutions for Healthcare

This week it has been unseasonably warm – around 65 degrees – and sunny in central Illinois. Even though it is a little early in the season, it makes me think of gardening.

Gardening is one of my favorite pastimes. I spend time each year planning the types and varieties of vegetables that I will grow. I decide where I will plant each variety and how much seed to purchase. The planning helps me make sure I have enough room for what I want to grow and helps me reduce the possibilities of disease by rotating my vegetables. Planning makes me a better gardener.

What does gardening have to do with excelling with Monarch? Like gardening, a good Monarch model/project should include a good plan. Planning not only helps us be better gardeners but also helps makes us become better at creating actionable data.

I have worked in hospital business offices for 35 years. During most of those years, I have produced reports to analyze data and improve the quality of processes. Currently I am an independent consultant helping hospitals get the data they need to make data based decisions.

I find the reporting capabilities of most healthcare information systems to be somewhat limited. They usually have many standard reports and a simple Ad Hoc report writer, but few have the ability to provide in-depth analysis, dashboard, or flash reports.

Excel and Monarch work well in healthcare. Alone, each is very powerful, but together they offer a vast array of solutions that do not require the assistance of IT professionals.

Define the requirement

I was recently consulting for rural hospital. The Chief Financial Officer wanted a way to summarize their payroll data – a one page flash report for each department. The data would be stratified by pay code with totals by pay period and year-to-date. He also wanted the flexibility to be able to add budget totals in the future. His request was to have the output in Excel using one workbook per pay period. Each department would be reported on its own sheet inside of that workbook.

The CFO shared a copy of the spreadsheet he had created as an example of the final report. This really helps me to get a visual of what the end result should look like – an expectation from the user. This jump-started my planning and gave me a map to follow. This is a huge help and a time saver.

From my review I noticed that the formatting of the report was much more than basic and included bolded text, underlining, line drawing, and inverse printing. At this point, I had no idea how I was going to replicate the formatting, but I knew that Monarch and Excel were up to the task of gathering, manipulating, stratifying, and reporting the data.

Determine the data sources

We spent some time discussing what source data he used for his report. He told me that he had obtained the data from several different reports, from two staff members. He gave me the details and reasoning for his formulas, and explained that his sample report had taken over ten man hours to produce. While his sample report was for only one department, his hope was that automation could separate the data by department and make it cost effective to produce this valuable report.

Since I had very little experience with the payroll data from this hospital’s information system, I needed to browse the manual, talk to users, and get to know the system in order to establish what data was available. Determining the best way to gather data is part of a good plan. What reports or data sources would contain the data needed and what calculations should be used? What filters were needed? Were any summaries going to be used and what was going to be exported?

Set the schedule

Another part of a good plan is a timeline. The CFO was very flexible with this. As part of my plan I would need to determine what was realistic and build in a couple of emergency buffers. My goal is to always exceed the expectation, so a realistic goal with room for emergencies is vital to maintain that goal.

Gardening requires many steps in the plan. For example a gardener must prepare the soil, fertilize, sow the seeds, cultivate, and harvest. With this report, it was apparent that multiple models/projects would be required to get the data in the format desired with the desired totals and stratifications.

Document, document, document

After talking to different staff members and reading a few pertinent pages in the manual, I was ready to start documenting the plan. I determined that it was going to be easier to create the year-to-date totals as the year progressed instead of running multiple reports to get that data on an ad hoc basis. Interestingly, the hospital’s information system did not have a single report with totals for hours or dollars by pay code.

Indentifying each step and along with what needed to be accomplished, I determined the need for eight different models/projects. I usually create a project with each model as it makes it easier to add exports later if needed.

I also separate complex tasks into smaller, easier to manage models. Since most of what I create will be used by others, this practice helps with subsequent revisions and improvements as they arise.

Build a process

The department name was not available through the Ad Hoc Report Writer, but it was part of the sample report. Getting it was an easy fix. First, create a simple model (Model1) that would trap the department number and the department name from a standard report. Now export those two data elements to Excel (Payroll1.xls) and use that file as the source for an external lookup.

Another bit of missing data was a pay period calendar: a file that has the calendar year, the beginning date and the ending date of each pay period along with the pay period number. Again, there was a simple solution. First, create a model (Model2) to trap the needed data from a standard report, and then export the data to Excel (Payroll2.xls) and use it as an external lookup data source. This file would only need to be created once per year as the pay period calendar never changes during the year.

Two different Ad Hoc reports from the hospital information system would be needed. Each report was for a single pay period. One would contain hours and dollars by pay code for non-productive hours; such as, vacation and jury duty. The other would contain hours and dollars for productive hours; such as, regular and overtime. Unfortunately, the system had a limit on the number of bytes of data that could be extracted in one report; therefore two reports needed to be used.

The data elements, pay period and calendar year, were available as filters in the ad hoc reporting system, but were not available to export from that system. Two calculated fields, defined as runtime parameters, were added to the next two models to capture these two fields for the final report.

The Monarch model built to process the Excel file created for the non-productive hours and dollars is named Model3. It used Payroll1.xls as an external lookup to get the department name field. It would format the data and rename the fields so that they could be more easily understood. This practice is especially helpful when others will be using your models and projects. The next model (Model4) would process the Excel file for the productive hours and do much the same with that data.

Both models required a filter to exclude the records that had zero hours and dollars since the ad hoc report writer had no way of excluding those. Both would export their in Excel format. For simplicity’s sake, the output for Model3 was named as Payroll3.xls and the output for the Model4 as Payroll4.xls.

The next model (Model5) would open the database file Payroll3.xls and use Payroll4.xls as an external lookup file. To make sure we were combining like data, the link was on department number, pay period, and calendar year. This would allow the entire dataset of pay period data to be combined into one file for easier processing. The export would be to Excel – Payroll3.xls.

The next model (Model6) would open the database file Payroll3.xls and use Payroll4.xls as an external lookup file. To make sure we were combining like data, the link was on department number, pay period, and calendar year. This would allow the calendar year data to be combined into one file and create a summary for the current pay period totals using department as the key field.

The export would be to an existing Excel file named Payroll6.xls and the summary data would be appended to existing data. This would be the file used for year-to-date totals and would contain a single record by department for each pay period.

Yes, model5 and model6 could have been combined into a single model/project with two exports. When I completed the original plan, keeping pay period and year-to-date data separated would facilitate any possible troubleshooting. In retrospect it wasn’t necessary, but this doesn’t create unwanted effects and adds minimal time to the process.

The next model (Model7) would open Payroll6.xls and create a summary of year-to-date data for the entire calendar year. It exports to Excel – Payroll7.xls. The exported data has a single record by department containing year-to-date totals for all pay codes.

The final model (Model8) would open Payroll5.xls which is the pay period specific data. It uses Payroll7.xls, the year-to-date data by department, as an external lookup. It also uses Payroll2.xls, the pay period calendar fields, as an external lookup. This model gathers only the data that will be used in the sample report, but it will contain all of the departments and creates a summary for the entire organization by pay period. This export would be named Payroll8.xls.

Produce the best presentation, easily

So far, success has been achieved. However, I hadn’t researched the “pretty” formatting in Excel quite yet. I toyed with the idea of going back to the CFO and explaining I could get his export in Word using a Mail Merge process and have the data populate a pretty Word form, but decided to seek an Excel-based solution first.

It was time to do an Internet search and see if any add-ins for Excel that might work. On the first search, I saw the words “mail merge entirely in Excel”. I’d found an add-in that fit the task perfectly, fittingly named “Mail Merge for Excel”. It takes a row of data per merge, which was exactly what was needed. They even allow you to try before you buy, so I downloaded the software.

As I started to learn the add-in, I found that a shell or a blank form of the final report would need to be created. That would be simple since the sample was supplied to me by the CFO. I decided that I would use the shell as a sheet in the Payroll8.xls file. After testing and making a minor change to Model5 to export a new calculated field – one that would trigger the mail merge – I was ready to purchase the add-in. Costing about $36 USD, this excellent tool is truly a bargain.

Automate for optimal execution

After testing the entire process from start to finish, running everything manually and making sure all of the numbers balanced, I began automating the process. While, the two reports from the hospital’s information system would still need to be created manually, the eight Monarch projects were automated using a command file. For this task I used the handy tool, ExcelWithMonarch Monarch Batch File Generator, found on this website.

The mail merge portion was left as a manual process.

I was almost ready to present the final version to the CFO, but first I had to prepare the final documentation of the Monarch models/projects and write a “how to” document to instruct the staff that would use these processes to create the reports. I do this for almost all of the processes that I supply to my customers as it helps them when they have staff changes and it reduces the number of support calls that I receive. The documentation also benefits me, at it makes it very easy to quickly help if I am called upon to troubleshoot or revise the process.

Delivering the solution

When I presented this to the CFO, he was pleased with the final product. His only question was how long it took to create for each pay period. Since we were already on pay period three when I was asked for the report, four pay periods needed to be processed when it was finished. That gave a great opportunity to provide a solid number based using the report multiple times. The final answer was “less than 30 minutes”.

Since the CFO was pleased with both the final report and the time required to produce the data, I considered this project a success.

Like gardening, once in a while you find a way to improve your skills. In gardening it may be a different variety or a better fertilizer. In creating actionable data it may well be a tool that you have never used. Indeed, I found an additional tool for my toolkit to continue Excelling with Monarch.

Thanks Joe!

With 35 years worth of experience in the healthcare sector, Joe Berry can help you to diagnose and cure your information challenges. Contact him and learn more by visiting www.bbshc.com.

Joe has a special reason for his continuing interest in healthcare: “I am just as passionate about education and awareness for organ donation and transplantation as I am about Monarch. I received the Gift of Life on October 17, 2007 and will spend the rest of my life helping save more lives.”

As Joe wrote, by giving your work good strong roots as a result of planning, documenting, and organizing projects into easily manageable parts, you’ll be certain that you and your business will grow, succeed, and even excel, with Monarch.

Working with Monarch to extract and manage the data we need is usually a very efficient experience. Often there are just three basic steps:

1. Open the data source,
2. Apply the model that was previously created, and
3. Export the data to another location for further use or analysis.

As we know from our earlier discussions in the 30 Days to Become a Better Monarch Modeler series, we can enhance our productivity even more by applying some simple techniques to accomplish these tasks, including using project files, batch files, and visual basic scripting.

Today on day 29 of the series, we’ll push the envelope a little harder, and offer some ideas as to what can be done when we automate Monarch within a full programming environment.

Welcome to COM

The Component Object Model software interface, or COM, is now an older technology, but is still very useful, and can be used to great advantage by both new programmers and veterans.

And while that’s all well and good and very interesting (I’m sure), you’re likely asking: “What does COM do and why should I use COM to control Monarch?”

What does COM do?

In a nutshell, COM allows programs to talk to one another. One program can direct another program to perform a task on demand, and report back its results.

For years now, I’ve exploited that ability to convert routine and repetitive work into single-click ease of use, and my tool of choice has been Excel. This has been for two fundamental reasons. First and foremost: every installation of Excel offers a full programming environment with its Visual Basic for Applications. There are multitudes of resources in the form of online tutorials and such, and printed books that made it possible to learn what was needed when I needed it. Second, it was the only programming environment that was available to me.

By the time that I’d made it to the end of the Monarch v5 Learning Guide, I had a pretty good idea of what the software could do, and was overjoyed to subsequently discover that there were mechanisms built into Monarch that would allow me to run it essentially by remote control.

The Monarch Programmer’s Guide was a good tool to learn how to use the control methods that had been built into Monarch for programmers to access. But I was glad that I had a background as a programmer/analyst writing code for integrated financial and manufacturing systems, as I found the writing style of the document to be somewhat technical. That shouldn’t have been a big surprise though, really, given its intended audience.

But over time I saw many non-technical users, Monarch’s primary audience, who could have benefited from implementing the automation of Monarch, but who struggled and felt frustrated with the experience, and generally gave up without achieving their goals.

What a shame, I thought.

A Better Way

All of this led to my developing a new tool: one that anyone with Excel could use to easily control Monarch, and which could be understood by anyone with experience in using Monarch.

I offer my Monarch Class Module for Excel as a free bonus to readers who choose to subscribe to the free FeedBurner service. FeedBurner will send you an email that contains the latest update to the ExcelWithMonarch.com site.

Within the class module, you’ll find not only the program code that you can import into your other Excel programming work (and instructions on how to do so), but also full descriptions of the methods (actions for Monarch to perform, like opening a report file or using a model file), and properties (which direct Monarch to activate particular items, or describe what’s in use). It’ll even be clear to you which of these you should use, depending upon whether you use the Standard or Pro edition of Monarch.

There’s also an organized collection of links on a sheet within the file to help you find the right programming mechanism to help you accomplish specific familiar tasks.

The proper use of every method and property is completely clearly and simply documented, along with a brief example of its usage, and navigation links on each sheet to assist in getting around the documentation.

Why should I use COM to control Monarch?

Remember, COM is all about programs interacting with one another. This means that you can use the text and values that are in your worksheet models to control your Monarch models.

Here are just some of things that I’ve done to make my Monarch life easier:

• Use Excel’s data validation lists to allow the user to choose from the list of names that I know already exist as filters in a collection of models, and have Monarch open each required model in series, and apply that specific filter before exporting data.
• Use cells to contain the names of the models and project files that I want to use in a given Monarch session.
• Use check boxes to determine which elements of the model will be exported, such as the table window, the current summary, all summaries or a named summary.
• Send cells values to Monarch to be used as export file names.
• Use radio buttons on worksheets to tell Monarch which window I want to activate before exporting.
• And more…

It’s really up to your needs and creativity.

The command line interface that Monarch provides is tremendously useful, as it allows you to automate the opening of data sources and model, and the required exporting. But there’s no control available at that level to set filters, change sort orders, or easily change the file paths or drive letters used.

The combination of the infinitely configurable Excel worksheet and Excel’s integrated VBA programming environment provide everything that you’ll ever need to control your predefined Monarch models and projects.

Take it to the Next Level

Once you’ve got a handle on how to write program code that can do your Monarch work for you, learn how to create systems that create custom reporting for you. Convert the thousands of pages of data that resides in the collection of the thirty reports that your group uses each and every week to manage the business into tools that effectively and efficiently consolidate the data and spotlight what needs attention.

Learn how to open the Excel files that Monarch just created for you and use that data to build pivot tables or a single page report that contains a number of custom lists. Learn to format cells automatically. Learn to resize the columns automatically so that the reader doesn’t see cropped values or cells that display as ### because the value is wider than the current column width. Learn to automatically create Excel workbook files that only contain the final reports for distribution that shelter your audience from everything that it took behind the scenes for you to build that report that you’ve supplied.

One step at a time, you can do this.

Your Task for Today

Your homework today is pretty easy. First, sign up for the FeedBurner site update service by email (see the section at top left of this page), and I’ll personally send you my Monarch Class Module for Excel which will make your Monarch automation work far easier to accomplish. Plus, you won’t miss out on the latest developments here. Trust me, every indication is that it’s going to be an active year around here and if you’re serious about wanting to excel with Monarch, it’s a great way to stay informed.

After that, make the next steps easier on yourself and if this your first foray into Excel programming, purchase John Walkenbach’s Excel VBA Programming for Dummies.

If you’ve got a little background or some previous experience with Excel programming, purchase either of his Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA or Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA, depending upon which version of the Excel software that you use.

When you become aware of what aspects of Monarch you can use to your advantage programmatically, this will shape what you regularly build into your models and projects, and this insight will undoubtedly help you become a better Monarch modeler.

How to Avoid Work with Monarch

Accomplishing repetitive tasks only feels like work when all of the fun has been sucked out of it.

As much as I enjoy building solutions with Monarch, if I had to click on every menu and button to get stuff done, I’d go crazy. Instead, the whole goal of devoting time to developing with Monarch is about getting work done easily and quickly, minimizing the stress and maximizing the accuracy, while doing so in as little time as necessary. We want to return to what it is that we’re meant to be doing.

For most of us, our value is in the greater role that we provide to our organizations, not in being data analysts. That’s why we were drawn to Monarch in the first place: it shelters us from the technology and empowers us to accomplish data management tasks so that we focus on what we really need to do.

So stop working for your data and let your data work for you. Invest in learning to develop your own custom systems that provide the final results that your group needs, and you’ll be thrilled that you’ve chosen to excel with Monarch.

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Continue your commitment to Become a Better Monarch Modeler with the conclusion, Part 30, of the series, or review Part 28.

Congratulations! You’ve read every part of the 30 Days to Become a Better Monarch Modeler series, and now, hopefully, you’re much more accomplished and proficient than you were beforehand.

You’ve mastered defining templates. You can handle just about any kind of report layout that comes your way. You can add new fields that extend the usefulness of your extractions, and can narrow vast amounts of data to locate that which is most important and sort and order it any way you please. You can even connect multiple data sources and build summaries that let you gain much greater insight into what your data is trying to tell you. Sharing your findings has never been easier now that you can quickly control your data exports.

You now know how to harness an awful lot of data. What are you going to do with all that ability? You’ve pushed yourself reasonably hard lately, especially if you actually did all of the tasks that were assigned along the way (and good for you if you did!). So don’t let it all be for preparing the odd model here and there now.

On day 28, we’ll look at what I recommend you do with your talents; the venture with which you can possibly make the biggest impact on your organization.

Every organization ought to have a dashboard style information system. The best solution for ease of use and general access for a lot of simultaneous users might be those systems that come with hefty price tags that are directly connected to your organization’s main information system, and require a team of IT specialists to maintain and update.

But that doesn’t mean that those dashboard solutions are the best solutions or even the only available solutions for you. Many would argue that those tend to leave a lot to be desired, and that you can do better than that, perhaps even single-handedly.

Create Your Ultimate Dashboard with Excel

Of course, where there’s a problem, there’s generally a solution. And where there are solutions, there’s often competition and choice, so there are alternate solutions. Plenty of software vendors want to sell you their dashboard tools, including Datawatch’s latest offering, Datawatch Dashboards, which I’ve briefly written about previously.

You may well find that one of those solutions could be a good fit for your organization’s needs, but before you commit your resources you owe it to yourself to try a homemade system first.

The best thing that you can do for yourself is to stop seeing Excel as nothing but a collection of rows and columns. Instead, see it as the blank canvas that it is, awaiting your best design for what your organization needs to best measure and manage its metrics.

If you think that there’s just no way that a spreadsheet, a “what-if” tool, can function as a management tool, then I’d advise you to think again. There was a contest run back in 2006 on the BI Network site (download the scenario file if you’d to challenge yourself) which requested that participants create dashboards to satisfy the scenario criterion – using any tool they wish – and while there were many fine entries, the selected winner was built with Excel (and the BonaVista Systems MicroCharts Excel add-in.) UPDATE March 2012: BonaVista Systems has closed due to the sad and untimely passing of its owner.

Simple, fast, and it works

Let me tell you a little story.

For some months I’d been publishing and distributing an entire package of financial information to a national management team. They really liked the format and weren’t particularly interested in pursuing an online dashboard information system, or in committing to the cost of its development and implementation to arrive at, in their minds, what they already had.

But I saw that there were opportunities to put more related information on a page. We had the business structured in such a way that I realized that I could devise a format, a presentation of the most critical information, for each of our departments and then just figure out how to update the data for each department. It all sounded so very possible.

At that point I had a pretty good handle on Excel, and my Monarch skills were coming along nicely I thought, and I did envision how I could build such a reporting system. But after hours of work, I realized that updating this system (a system that even then I believed to be approaching functional at best and the rickety work of a hack at worst) would take much, much too long every fiscal period. Time that I knew that I wouldn’t have.

Nobody that I worked with had ever constructed such a thing, so I began to search for the way answer. “Somebody out there must have documented something like this,” I thought.

It didn’t take too long before I discovered ExcelUser.com. I basically wasted the next few days pouring over the examples of dashboards and the other articles, thinking that I was a smart guy and that with my knowledge of Excel I could figure out what was between the lines and avoid getting out my credit card to pay for the advertised ebook which seemed to contain the answer I sought.

Finally, one Friday afternoon I saw the light and gave in. I read Charley Kyd’s ebook “Dashboard Reporting with Excel” and reviewed his sample files over the weekend. Busy with weekly reporting on Monday, I wasn’t able to start building my envisioned system “properly” until Tuesday.

By lunch on Thursday I was done, and for the next three years, the only change I made to that system each month was to update the data for each new fiscal period.

Of course I continue to use the basic techniques that Charley still teaches. When I first read his book, I envisioned how I could take advantage of specific Monarch abilities to tie in with his recommendations and make the job even easier than he’d described. Now with the enhancements found in Monarch v10, creating great Excel dashboard systems is easier still.

I recently constructed no less than seven different fully user-interactive dashboard report systems – each with the same basic layout, yet each is customized to provide different views of the business – in less than two days. I share that with you only because I suspect that you believe that this type of work is difficult and time-consuming.

I could go on and on, but it wouldn’t make any sense to you if you haven’t read “Dashboard Reporting with Excel”.

Even if you do decide that you should go with a major vendor’s solution, with the knowledge that you gain from your initial efforts, you’ll know exactly what your requirements are, and what presentations do and do not work for your group. It’s a really inexpensive investment and – please don’t share this with anyone – outright fun.

Do yourself a huge favor and just try it. With a satisfaction guarantee and refund policy, what have you got to lose?

Your Task for Today

If you haven’t already given it some thought, write down a list of the types of metrics, indicators and lists that you’d love to have on a single page. A combination of charts (for efficiently conveying trends) and tables is a good start. Perhaps you have different needs for different groups. Recall your consultations from earlier in the series. You have many opportunities to contribute to your organization.

Do a little research; your due diligence if you will. Find some major solution vendors online, and get your own numbers together. Find some impartial reviews of their products.

Now, equipped with some up to date information, go buy “Dashboard Reporting with Excel”. With the amount of effort that you’ve put into improving your Monarch skills, you owe it to yourself to expand your work in a directly related manner. Don’t do what I did. Get on with it. You’ll thank yourself and maybe me too.

The Future is Today

Naturally software progresses continuously, and given the market demand for the benefits that dashboard systems delivers, we’re bound to see plenty of improvements and new products sooner than later. I’m sure that our friends at Datawatch and Microsoft have great things in store for us.

But knowing what can be done right now, make today your future and start building cool and useful dashboard systems that exemplify your ability to excel with Monarch.

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Continue your commitment to Become a Better Monarch Modeler with Part 29 of the series, or review Part 27.

Over the course of the 30 Days to Become a Better Monarch Modeler series we’ve learned how to positively fill Monarch with actionable data. We’ve morphed reports that had content that was cast in stone into dynamic and practically living data that is now free to tell its once concealed story.

But all great stories need an audience, so today on day 17 of the series we’ll find ways to spread the story by exporting from Monarch with every means at our disposal. This particular story starts with the Export Wizard toolbar button…

Report Your Report

When the Export Wizard is launched, the first choice is to decide from which of the three Monarch windows you want to use as the basis for the export.

When the Report window is selected, we can use one of the following file types:

• Adobe PDF (.pdf), the standard Portable Document Format now commonly used to share documents.
• Portable Report Format (.prf), Monarch’s proprietary format used to distribute the original report and other Monarch features in a single package.
• Fixed-length text (.txt), which creates a plain text file that uses spaces to pad the lines so that the output matches what is currently displayed in the Report window.

Depending which format you choose, the Wizard gives you different options for your next decision.

If you’ve selected to output a PDF file, you’re presented with options with which to customize the PDF file:

• Do you want the file to be secure? The user will have to supply a password of your choosing just to view the file.
• How tightly do you want to control the use of the file? You can grant or deny the ability to print the file, extract content from it, edit it, or add comments to it.
• If you password protect the file, which level of encryption do you wish to apply?

For PRF files, you can choose whether to include the Tree Index, the model itself, and whether you want to encrypt the file (and optionally apply a password if you do), and what level of file compression that you’d like to apply.

There are no additional options for fixed-length text files.

Select * From Table

Things get more interesting when choosing to export from the Table window when you’re using Monarch v10.

You can take advantage the filters that you’ve built to create customized exports. You can ignore the filters and export everything, or you can apply any individual filter by name, or (this can be a great one) use all of the filters in the model. If you do choose to apply all of the filters, you have an additional choice to export each filtered data set to its own separate file, or to create different tables within a single export file so that each filtered set will create a unique table.

If you have defined custom sort orders, you can apply one of them in the export.

Next, you select the file format to create with the export. The numerous options include:

• Lotus 1-2-3 (.wk3) file
• “Classic” Excel (.xls) and Excel 2007 (.xlsx and .xlsm)
• Paradox (db)
• Fixed-length text (*.txt)
• Delimited text (*)
• Access database formats (.mdb and the 2007 format .accdb)
• dBase (.dbf)
• Adobe PDF (.pdf) and even
• Web pages (.htm and .html)

My first paying job required my building dBase and 1-2-3 files. To think that I can still use recently released software to create those formats… I never would have believed it back then.

The fixed-length text format and the PDF format offer the same options as described for the Report window exports and most of the other files have limited, functional if somewhat mundane options. The notable exception is the Excel 2007 format.

When exporting to .xlsx or .xlsm files, you have another multitude of powerful choices:

• If you’re planning to add VBA code, or you just want to essentially certify that you created that file, Monarch can add a digital signature to the export automatically.
• Excel’s auto-filter feature can be activated in the file.
• The feature recently added to Monarch, context, which allows you to attach the source report(s) to the file so that auditors and others can track data origins without your assistance.
• Finally, you can easily add a pivot table to the file by selecting which fields to use for each element of the pivot table. There are a number of ways to further customize this aspect of the export. We’ll probably further discuss Monarch’s pivot table creation in detail one day soon.

Conclusive Summaries

Monarch offers the same file types when exporting summaries as it does for exporting from the Table window, but some different options are available.

You can elect to export the summary in its most detailed form, regardless of its current onscreen presentation, or to export it as is.

There’s an additional option that can save you a ton of effort. For summaries that have multiple values in the first key field, you can elect to either create a new file, or a new table within a single file, for each different value for that key. So for a summary based on customer names, you could create a multiple exports using a single summary, and each export would represent information for only a single customer. How do you typically build your summaries, and how will this impact how you handle some of your work?

Well, that rounds out the basic exporting functionality that Monarch offers.

Your Task for Today

Odds are that you’ve got your favorite export formats and frequently use those same formats for all of your work. Spend some time today creating exports by using the other available formats.

Additionally, and more importantly, think about how you could overcome some pure modeling challenges that you may have encountered – you know those reports that you can’t seem to model properly no matter what approach you try – by using an export file as input file to somehow assist with modeling the original report.

Finally, think about what sorts of layouts work best for you for sharing certain data types, and for certain purposes. Which layout would make it easy for you to whip up some great Excel charts? Which would make that task more difficult? Monarch offers you the freedom to make your work as simple or as complex as you choose. You can learn to choose wisely, but at times it takes some practice. Start today.

Become a Storyteller

Sometimes exporting is just a means to an end when your aim is to simply populate one information system with data from another. But at other times, you’ve got a great opportunity to craft a tale and unlock the truth that’s hiding in that voluminous report.

The next great story need not be found at a bookstore; it could be what you create when you excel with Monarch.

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Continue your commitment to Become a Better Monarch Modeler with Part 18 of the series, or review Part 16.