Once you’ve built the templates and calculated fields required to extract all of the data within a given report with Monarch, do you save your model, close it, and carry on to the next project, or do you spend some additional time with the report to transform your model from being perfectly functional and workmanlike to being the high performance analysis tool that it can be?
Adding some filters to the model often lets you make sense of your data, revealing both the gems and the lumps of coal that are contained in your reports. To create truly powerful filters, you’ll want to master the Boolean logic (a fancy term with simple impacts) that Monarch offers with its operators.
Those familiar with filtering data with Excel know that you’re not only limited to data found on a single worksheet, but that defining and altering a filter that involves multiple fields is a clumsy exercise at best. On the other hand, the process of defining, changing and activating filters with Monarch is not only easier, but far faster.
Since multiple summaries can be built to be based on specific defined filters, you can not only create multiple views of a particular data set, but your filters can provide multiple data sets while you’re working with a single set of reports, or even just a single report.
Now that special, custom views of your data are available, you can export those and re-purpose them as inputs for one or more additional Monarch process too. Monarch Pro users can use the exported files as database sources for new inputs and/or data that can be used in other external lookups to provide even more analytical power to static reports.
By exporting summaries without totals, you can build what are essentially multiple data tables. Make sure that you do not suppress duplicate values for your key fields when building those summaries, though.
Shine on, you crazy diamond
By using more than just the regular data extraction tools when building Monarch models, you can flush out everything that is hiding in those plain Jane reports. Have a good look at what sort of content is in your next report and think about what you might be able to do with it that might be a little unconventional. You might just find that you can stop working so hard to find the treasures, and instead can have those treasures work for you.
When you provide the insights that allow for truly informed decision making – most especially when what you’re generating doesn’t already exist in another system – those on your team that count on you will know that you really do excel with Monarch.
