A visitor to the site was recently seeking information on viable alternatives to using Monarch software. Exactly what those alternatives are is a fair question, and one that should be properly addressed.

Here are just ten ways you could achieve Monarch’s results without using Monarch:

1. Re-key all of the data from the outputs of one system into another system. You’re quick and reasonably accurate, so it won’t take you too long and you probably won’t introduce many errors.
2. Buy and implement a large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, most of which are affordable for every organization and provide all of your information needs.
3. Build a custom integrated database application just for your organization and quickly learn to extract the exact data you need with Structured Query Language (aka SQL). Get good at it, because you’ll need to teach all of your users SQL too so that that they can safely and efficiently get the data they need too.
4. Learn to program ActiveX Data Objects.
5. Install and use the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers for your database, or write your own, then use them to bring data into MS Query.
6. Share nothing but raw data with your co-workers. They all know how to filter and summarize the data themselves, don’t they?
7. Just use Excel. It’s easy to link data from multiple files into one file with a function like VLOOKUP and it recalculates thousands of formulas quickly. That’s much more efficient than Monarch Pro’s external lookup facilities for consolidating all of your data.
8. Speaking of Excel, it’s really easy to re-use and completely re-purpose your templates for a different application, right? Monarch’s object linking, which lets you import the various tools you defined in a previous model (everything from extraction templates to calculated fields, filters, and more) can’t possible have any real value. Can it?
9. Pour over huge printed reports with a highlighter and sticky notes isolating key data.
10. You work at a big company, so take advantage of the resources available to you and have your IT department get the data for you and compile it a format that you can use.

Or you could just spend a few hundreds bucks on Monarch Pro and be genuinely productive within a half hour, getting work done - by yourself - that you never imagined was possible, let alone easy, and maybe even fun.

Are you ready to excel with Monarch?