Some time ago I wrote about how auditors should be able to use Monarch to assist both themselves and their clients.
Last month Datawatch published an update to Monarch which brings the current release to version 10.5. The patch is a free upgrade to users of version 10 of the program.
In addition to a few necessary fixes, v10.5 introduces some enhancements as well, including:
- Support for digital signatures in xlsx and xlsm files,
- Improvements to PDF file importing,
- Enhancements to better support Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2, and the big one,
- The new Monarch Context functionality.
If you haven’t yet heard, the Monarch Context feature allows you to include the original source report(s) in your Excel 2007 export files. This news should be of great interest to auditors and their clients.
Experienced Monarch users will know that they can easily move from a particular record in the Table window, which looks very much like a spreadsheet, to the position in the report from where that record was extracted.
The new Monarch Context feature offers that same ease of use to quickly determining the source of a record to users of a Monarch-exported Excel file.
When the Excel user installs the free Excel add-in supplied by Datawatch (they do not need to have Monarch installed), a Monarch section is added to their Excel ribbon. Clicking a button in this section will then open a new window in which the source report is displayed and the source record will be highlighted within the report.
This should be a boon to distrusting auditors and managers everywhere. 
This is all well and good, you say, but how does it benefit me as a Monarch user?
It could positively impact you if Monarch is relatively new to your organization, or if you are now supplying Excel exports to people in your group who are new to this process. You’ll likely spend less time fielding questions about the data, such as “Are you sure that this is accurate? It doesn’t look quite right to me. Can you double-check?”
Of course, it might be a bit of a double-edged sword if your model isn’t extracting the data accurately. Think of it as motivation to double-check the accuracy of your extractions.
Setup Context Exports Carefully
It’s worth noting that if you intend to add the source report(s) to your Excel export so that others can take advantage of the Excel Monarch Context add-in, there are a few points that you’ll need to know:
- The source reports can only be added to the Excel file when exporting from the Table window. You won’t be able to add the source report when export a summary to a new Excel file.
- You cannot include the source report(s) in an append to an existing Excel file. You must be creating a new file, or overwriting an existing one.
- Unless the source reports are huge, adding the source report(s) to the Excel file won’t add significantly to the file size as the reports are compressed when included in the file, and text files tend to compress very well.
Big Brother Update
Of course, when Monarch gets updated, Datawatch does their best to also integrate the features that went into the Monarch update into Monarch’s big brother, Data Pump.
That was the case this past week when Datawatch announced Data Pump 10.5 which provides easy to implement automation of Monarch processes, and more.
The opportunities just keep coming for both you and your organization to excel with Monarch.
