The second day of the conference started with a presentation by Microsoft Excel MVP Curtis Frye, who gave us a run through of some of the best features available in Excel 2007 for developing dashboard reports. Not only did Curtis demonstrate the techniques that he recommends, he also was careful to point out the pitfalls that might be encountered and exactly how to avoid them. Nicely done Curtis.

Next up for me was a two hour session led by Microsoft’s Carlo Malaguzzi and Datawatch’s Gareth Horton who showed how a couple of Datawatch’s products work together very well with SharePoint. Carlo gave us an overview of Microsoft’s SharePoint, more from a conceptual, high level view rather than overloading us with a slew of technical details. Gareth ran through a concrete example of just how easy it is to build usable, meaningful dashboards which present key performance indicators (KPIs) derived from very large data sets. Really powerful stuff.

After lunch I attended another Datawatch session during which they introduced to us a new product, Monarch Business Intelligence Server, as presented by Phil Lafond. This promises to bring all kinds of power to smaller user groups that simply don’t have the requirements that justify moving up to Datawatch’s enterprise level solutions. When released, this product will bring a lot of power to analysts, managers and other users with a simple and easy to use web-based interface. I’m sure that this one will make a lot of people very happy.

In my last presentation session for the day, Datawatch’s Mike Urbonas detailed with plenty of concrete examples how to use Monarch to avoid spreadsheet errors. Mike’s past experience working in finance was obvious as he provide great design tips and novel ways to audit your worksheets with Monarch. By using just a few of the ideas that Mike provided will guarantee that your work will be accurate and reliable, every time.

Finally, I spent the remainder of the day in a Voodoo Monarch training class led by Datawatch’s Steve Caiels. The Voodoo sessions are a great way to sharpen your Monarch skills as they include some of the most challenging reports that you’d ever want to model. This is second time I’ve been fortunate enough to attend a Voodoo class led by Steve. He’s a great instructor whose fun style makes learning pretty sophisticated techniques thoroughly enjoyable.

To wrap up another terrific day, Datawatch arranged for all of us to spend the evening at a local ranch, with some nice snacks, cold drinks, an entertaining rodeo event, and a fabulous dinner. To cap it off, I was fortunate to have spent the evening being very much entertained by my new friend Chris who reminded me that having an awful lot of fun at work is OK; it doesn’t have to be all business all the time. All things in balance, right? Thanks Chris. Your company is lucky to have you.

It’s been a long day, and I’m presenting again tomorrow morning, so I’ll wrap this up now. I also have some other presentations to attend, and I’m very much looking forward to those too. I’m sure that during the last day of the 2008 user conference I’ll learn some new ways to excel with Monarch.