Hook up with Lookups!

One of the best reasons to use Monarch Pro is its ability to easily add more data to what you extract from your initial data source. This will allow you to analyze your data in ways not possible with your existing source.

The Problem

Let’s say you have a sales report that shows units sold by customer, but you want units sold by sales rep, and all of your available reports only give you dollar amounts based on sales rep, not units. Further, the sales rep names don’t appear on any of the customer based reports. What do you do?

Typically, you’d first get the customer sales data into Excel. Then you’d build a separate list showing the sales rep names for all of your customers, probably including that as another sheet in file. Finally, you’d probably use one of Excel’s lookup functions to get the rep names into your unit data, based on the customer name.

If you’ve got up to a few hundred rows of unit data, and a handful of customers, that’ll be OK. But have you ever used lookup formulas across thousands, or tens of thousands of rows? I hope you’ve got a really powerful PC and/or a lot of time on your hands, because every time you recalculate that spreadsheet it’s going to take awhile. If you didn’t include your rep list within your file, and it’s in a different Excel file located on a network drive, you may as well go for lunch now. I hope you don’t have a tight deadline for this!

And that all of that assumes that you’re well acquainted with the lookup functions and all of their particular intricacies.

The Solution

Instead, use Monarch Pro’s external lookups. You still need the list that tells you which rep is for which customer, but you’ll be done in a fraction of the time, and your final data set in an Excel file will be much smaller, calculate faster, and will be easier to use and share with less experienced Excel users as it won’t have all of those complex functions.

With Monarch’s external lookups you can easily add a number of related fields to your data, and the end user of your final data will have a complete data set without needing detailed knowledge of specific Excel functions and features, or access to the potentially remote data source.

External lookups can easily bring a lot more data into a very simple report, producing a very powerful decision making tool and helping you excel with Monarch.