photo credit: fotographix.ca

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, 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.

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.

—

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.)

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.

Yesterday’s topic of filtering Monarch’s extractions and calculations helped to focus on specific aspects of the data. But what if, even after that effort, we’re still left with a large sample to make sense of?

Today on day 13 of the 30 Days to Become a Better Monarch Modeler series, we’ll rather quickly sort through, well, sorting with Monarch.

Organize and Prioritize

One of the easiest analysis mechanisms Monarch offers is its ability to store a number of different predefined sort orders for the data displayed in the Table window.

In the toolbar you’ll see the AtoZ icon. Clicking it displays the Sort Orders dialog. Click the New… button to create a new sort definition.

The Sort Order Definition dialog is really so clear that I probably shouldn’t even describe it. But for the sake of those who are interested in Monarch’s abilities, but who don’t yet own the software, here goes.

The first thing that you’ll want to do is create a name for your sort. Make this relevant to the nature of the sort. Just like naming filter definitions, we can use only up to 31 characters for the sort name, so name them wisely.

Next up we see a list of the available field on the left, and an empty box on the right, with Clear, Add and Remove buttons featured prominently in the middle. Click a field name in the left box, then the Add button to list this field in the sort order. The default sort order is “Ascending”. To change this to “Descending”, just double click the field name in the sort fields list.

Pretty simple, right? This is where it gets a bit more interesting. Monarch will allow us to add multiple fields to the sort order, and the order in which they appear in this list will dictate which field gets priority over which field. The field at the top of the list will be the “master” sort, and all others will follow in order until the end.

If the sequence needs to be reorganized, then we can either drag a field up or down the list or right-click on a field and select from the pop-up menu to reposition it higher or lower in the list, remove it from the list altogether, or flip its sort order.

Sorting: Goes Great with Metrics

In and of itself, defining a custom sort, or even multiple sorts for different purposes can go a long way in deciphering what’s really going on with the data, but this deceptively simple mechanism can be an invaluable tool for the system designer.

Let’s suppose for a moment that we’ve invested in ourselves and have purchased Charley Kyd’s remarkable eBook to help us rapidly learn to build great dashboard reports. In it, Charley describes the steps needed to build terrific Top 10 tables which help to spotlight items that need to convey more information than a small chart can.

The enterprising Monarch modeler, equipped with the ability to build customized sorts, will likely quickly envision how to extend Charley’s concepts to be able to build multi-level top n tables for his or her dashboard reports which will allow for the report viewer to drill down deeper without changing the related dataset and without lengthy recalculations.

Automated Sorting

This is a slight case of getting ahead of ourselves, but it’s worth mentioning before moving on that we can automate the activation of a selected sort order definition. It’s one of the few thing that we can’t do via the command line, but we do have full control of sort order activation via Monarch’s COM interface and it’s an easy task with Excel VBA with the ExcelWithMonarch.com Excel Class Module for Monarch.

Your Task for Today

Get comfortable with building custom sorts into your models. Build a handful of sorts that will assist in analyzing your data. Play with rearranging the field sequence and review the impact of the change on the data displayed.

Don’t Get Out of Sorts

Frequently the simplest tools offer the most power, and Monarch’s easy to use sorting abilities will put you in total control of your data. Master and command sorting and you’ll excel with Monarch.

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Continue your commitment to Become a Better Monarch Modeler with Part 14 of the series, or review Part 12.

A sufficiently high level of technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke

Jon Peltier is the wizard of Excel charting. On his PTS Blog, he describes how to make Excel do things with graphs that you not only likely believed to be impossible, but you may not have even dreamed up the concept in the first place.

A big part of Jon’s toolkit is his ability to control Excel via VBA, the programming environment that’s built into every copy of Excel. There are ways to control every aspect of Excel programmatically, and this includes a number of ways to handle charting tasks.

Charts are a big component of Charley Kyd’s solutions too, but Charley knows that a lot of Excel users prefer programming free solutions, so you won’t find much program code on ExcelUser.com. Having said that, Charley does understand that sometimes a bit of code is the best way to accomplish a regular task, so he doesn’t shy away from it altogether.

Over at Dick Kusleika’s DailyDoseOfExcel.com, on any given day you’ll find more Excel experts congregating and discussing all manner of Excel topics than in any bar in Redmond. From functions to interface design and general computer science topics, you’ll find a healthy dose of great advice; much of which involves VBA.

Chandoo isn’t adverse to recommending VBA solutions either.

I’ve posted a few times here about how you can make your Monarch work easier with automation, and I offer a free tool that uses VBA to help program Monarch to site subscribers.

But still, very few Excel users are comfortable, much less functional, with VBA. What does that really mean to you if the prospect of programming is a scary thing?

It means that you’re in the wrong group, and that you need to act.

Do you want to be the magician or the nameless assistant?

You’re constantly improving your Monarch skills to make your work easier and to be better able to handle challenging modeling problems. This simple act differentiates you. As you acquire and refine your Monarch skills, you improve your edge over others that struggle with acquiring and using data and information.

Those that can make the most of what Excel has to offer are far more productive than those who cannot, and hiring managers know this. Today you need every available advantage. It’s time to get out of your comfort zone. You can do this. You need to do this.

While it takes both parties to properly pull off the illusion, it’s the magician who is the star.

Get a spell book

In Fantasia, Mickey used the sorcerer’s spell book. You’ll need to get yourself a copy of either John Walkenbach’s Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA or Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA, or his volume Excel 2007 VBA Programming For Dummies, co-written with Jan Karl Peiterse.

Then subscribe to ExcelWithMonarch.com site updates and you’ll receive my free Excel tool that you can use to automate your Monarch work. With this combination of skills, you’ll be in the valued minority, and you’ll be able to do far more than just extract data. You’ll be capable of single-handedly developing not just data models but great and valuable fully functional information systems.

Don’t worry; there are plenty of examples in the my document to guide you as you learn. It’s easier than pulling a rabbit out of a hat!

Be like Houdini

Great results for you, your work, and your organization, aren’t created magically; they’re within your control and grasp. All that you need to do is escape your comfort zone.

It all starts with your in-demand ability to excel with Monarch.

Everybody that uses Excel regularly has their favorite functions that seem to appear in most of their work, and I’m no exception. Working as I do with data extracted by Monarch, I use Excel’s various lookup functions frequently.

That said, I rarely use the Indirect function. I just never really thought that I needed to take advantage of it.

Quoting from Excel’s online help, you “Use INDIRECT when you want to change the reference to a cell within a formula without changing the formula itself”. The little example that is supplied in the help certainly didn’t do much to convince me that I need to include Indirect in my list of regularly used functions.

But that opinion has changed.

The old way is too slow

I recently found myself working with an Excel file that had dozens of sheets, each of which had the same structure but reflected data for different business lines. Within each sheet there were column groups for actual results, budgeted amounts, and forecasted amounts.

I wanted to make it easy to graph the various amounts for different topics and metrics for each business line by grouping the values to facilitate developing the graphs. Since I had quite a number of graphs to develop for each of the worksheets, I decided it was best to create a sheet for each business line that summarized all of the graphing values for that business line.

I’ve done similar work previously by building the first sheet using various lookup functions to retrieve values from other sheets, then duplicating the master sheet and, using the find and replace dialog, replacing references to the worksheet names first used with other names. This can be a tedious and time consuming job that requires some care.

Develop off-sheet references quickly and correctly

Instead, this time I used the Indirect function to handle the changing sheet names for me and I couldn’t believe how quick and easy the process of developing the values for my graphs became. I was honestly shocked.

I began the work by making it easy to build all of the range references I would need by separating the components. One cell held the name of the worksheet from which I wanted to retrieve the necessary values. Then three cells would contain the range to be used within that worksheet for each group of actual results, budget values, and forecast values.

That’s really all of the information that the Indirect function needs, but there’s one important if not critical point to discuss regarding the Indirect function.

Odds are that you’ve been using Excel for awhile, and are familiar with how Excel builds off-sheet references. For instance, if you need cell A5 on Sheet1 to be ten percent of the value in A5 on Sheet2, the formula you get is:

Sheet2!A5*0.1

If Sheet2’s name is “Budget Data” however, what you get is:

‘Budget Data'!A5*0.1

This distinction is important if we want our Indirect function to work reliably. Sheet names containing spaces must be enclosed with single quote marks, whereas sheet names without spaces must not include quote marks.

With the sheet name keyed into B1, the budget values range listed in B2 as $AQ$16:$BH500, the actual values range listed in B3 as $E$16:$V$500, and the forecast values range listed in B4 as $X$17:$AO$500, I set the formula for C2 as

=IF(ISERROR(FIND(" ",$B$1)),$B$1&"!"&B2,"'"&$B$1&"'!"&B2)

C3 becomes

=IF(ISERROR(FIND(" ",$B$1)),$B$1&"!"&B3,"'"&$B$1&"'!"&B3)

and C4 becomes

=IF(ISERROR(FIND(" ",$B$1)),$B$1&"!"&B4,"'"&$B$1&"'!"&B4)

Finally, I included the Indirect function in a VLOOKUP formula similar to

=VLOOKUP(KeyValue,INDIRECT($C$2),ColumnOffset,FALSE)

Combine the INDIRECT function with Monarch v10 exports

One of the great new features in available in Monarch v10 is its new ability to export Summary in a different manner. Not a different file format, but a new level control has been introduced with which you can export data.

Experienced Monarch users will know that Monarch’s summaries offer the choice to group, and provide subtotals for, related data. Monarch v10 now allows you to export these groups individually. Well, not quite individually, per se, as you must export the entire summary, but where the exported data for each group goes is up to you.

You have two available options:

• 1) You can create individual files for each group, or
• 2) You can create different tables for each group within a single file.

What does this really mean? Let’s say that you’ve got data summarized for 26 products listed: Product A through Product Z, and you want to export to the Excel xls file format.

Option 1 will give you 26 files named “Product A.xls” through “Product Z.xls”.

Option 2 will give you 26 sheets within a single file, with a name of your choice, each sheet named “Product A” through “Product Z”.

You can export to any of the following file formats: accdb, db, dbf, htm, html, mdb, pdf, txt, wk3 (Seriously, who’s still using that? ), xls, xlsm, and xlsx.

I tested this new exporting technique with the model I discussed recently concerning using Monarch for organizing folder and file names. In about five minutes Monarch created almost 350 xls files for me.

Let’s think about this for a moment. Do you need to share data electronically, but not everything should go to everyone? Do you often customize your data packages for your audience? How long does that take you?

Remember as well that these aren’t raw data dumps from the Table window. These are fully formatted custom summary views, complete with Excel’s outlining enabled and all the other bells and whistles that Monarch summaries offer, if that’s the format you use for exporting.

Your ROI for upgrading to Monarch v10 might just be met within a couple of hours by using this one single feature alone.

Just try doing that work without Monarch. Instead, do it purely with Excel. Oh, and I’ll be generous and even give you a whole ten minutes. Start now. I double-dog dare you.

Nothing handles data like Excel paired with Monarch

Once you master Excel’s Indirect function I’m confident that you’ll envision all manner of opportunities to capitalize on Monarch v10’s new exporting abilities. Finally, here’s a bonus for you for reading this far: an Indirect function demo file (25kb).

Upgrade to Monarch v10 and now more than ever, you’ll excel with Monarch.

For the last couple of years I’ve been running a particular report generation every week. This Excel custom VBA program acquires new data with Monarch, of course, and creates a distributable file that shelters the recipients of the file from the behind the scenes calculations required to get to the end result. One of the last steps in the process copies the worksheets that contain final formatted reports into a fresh new Excel workbook. On average, the worksheet copy from one workbook to another took about 8 seconds.

Then, in early October, it all fell apart.

The bulk of the process was running almost normally, if a bit sluggishly. The precursor to the grand finale was taking about 5 minutes longer than its normal 10 minutes. Not a big deal, I thought. I can tolerate that.

But the last steps went from eight seconds to a ridiculous length of time to complete: upwards of 10 minutes!

Of course, by now we’re all trained now to think, “What changed?” What was recently installed on the computer?

Hmm. Nothing. No new software. No Windows updates.

OK then, perhaps the Excel file that I use to create the reports, the one with all the behind the scenes stuff, somehow became corrupted. As a test, I created a new file with similar size and structures, and duplicated a sheet copy. I fully expected to discover that copying a sheet from this document to a new workbook would work normally, and would take mere seconds. Of course, that didn’t happen. The test took about 10 minutes, just like the file that I suspected to be corrupt.

Great. What now?

The really odd thing was that everything else on the computer seemed to be working just fine. Email. Web. Word processing. Everything was fine. Except that this rogue report generation was forcing me to work 14 hour days and stressing out completely every time, because it made no sense.

Naturally, I did what everyone does. Google it. This lead to my trying out the ideas I found that others had recommended for Excel performance issues. Manually clearing out the Temp folder, and adjusting the size of the Windows swap file. I even removed all of my personalized Excel macros, and my custom toolbars, looking for something, anything that was interfering somehow.

None of it worked.

Then, out of sheer desperation, in one fell swoop I deleted all of network printers that I had setup on my system except the three that I absolutely needed. Working on a large network, I had another dozen or so that I used infrequently.

And that was it. The copy process returned from taking 10 minutes to complete to requiring mere seconds.

Hours of research and trial and error and frustration disappeared with a solution that took, oh, about 8 seconds to accomplish.

At least one of those printers – I’ll never know which one – was causing the delay. Another strange symptom was that I never saw measurable network activity in the Task Manager, or other processes taking up CPU cycles.

Hopefully I’ll never see that problem again. I won’t get messages asking if the reports will be published soon. I won’t be the last one in the office. Again.

I’ll just get back to reliably using Excel with Monarch.

Not every process improvement task that you undertake needs to take weeks or months to accomplish. Sometimes you can genuinely produce terrific long term benefits in mere minutes.

I was recently approached by someone began the conversation by saying that he needed my help to “automate a report update with some programming”.

He had been manually updating a weekly Excel report by flipping through a report that’s regularly a few hundred pages in length. The key values that he needed were clearly labelled, but he needed to differentiate these totals for different categories, and those categories were also clear within the report.

The entire update process typically took at least an hour, as it involved updates for multiple departments and as it was to be done on Monday mornings, he found that he was always interrupted by someone or other who needed something else to be done quickly.

Since the report in use was quite straightforward, I was able to create a Monarch model for him very quickly. At that point, I asked if this was a good representation of the data that he required. He indicated that there were some records that, for his specific purpose, he didn’t want to have included. With Monarch’s advanced filtering abilities I created a data set that exactly represented the values that he required.

“Thanks! That’ll make it very easy for me to do the data entry into my Excel report”, he said, sounding quite pleased.

Of course, you know what my response was. Basically, “You’ll do no such thing.”

In just a few clicks I was able to create a calculated field that would generate unique key values that could be used as a connection between the Excel report and the data table.

I then set out to create a Monarch project which would export an Excel data table, always overwriting a specific Excel file found in a specific folder.

Another minute later and I had a simple batch file that he could run from his Windows desktop to automatically run Monarch and create that custom data extract for him.

Next, I restructured his Excel report ever so slightly, and added some lookup functions to bring in the new data from the Monarch export automatically.

The entire process change took less than an hour of my time to not only conceive, but develop – all without custom programming. Hey, a two line batch file doesn’t count!

The resulting process is bound to save him countless hours, stress and frustration, and possibly even data entry errors for many weeks to come.

Time Keeps on Tickin’

Time is our most precious, and often most expensive, resource. Every organization has some amount of manually updated information processes. Which routine process can you convert from drudgery into an opportunity to showcase just how you excel with Monarch?