Auto mechanics have cabinet after cabinet of tools, as do carpenters and plumbers, surgeons and dentists. Every tool has a special use and its shape and purpose has been refined over many, many years. The physical space required to house these collections of tools can be tremendous.
The other night I attended a performance by the country rock greats the Eagles, who are touring in support of their Long Road Out of Eden CD. I’d not seen them before, but I’ll definitely be there if I get another opportunity as it was a superb show. Don’t miss them if they come to your town.
Of course, musicians have their own tools too: their instruments. Some have more than others, and the boys in the Eagles must have dedicated several of their equipment trailers just to store their guitars as they each changed guitars after almost every song!
Monarch Pro: The Swiss Army Knife of BI?
It made me thankful that I don’t need a huge collection of different tools just to be productive. All that’s required is a little computer system, access to a data source such as a large ERP system or even a much smaller accounting system, Monarch and Excel. With those few tools, the possibilities for developing customized business intelligence and the ability to turn raw data into real information are just about endless.
Monarch is an amazing part of the complete toolkit, because it’s a collection of tools in and of itself. How many other standalone tools provide the complete range and flexibility to:
- Acquire data from just about any external source
- Convert unstructured data from existing reports (that can have almost any layout) into structured data in seconds
- Add new calculations to the acquired or converted data
- Create and manage ways to sort the data based on multiple levels
- Create and manage ways to filter the data in practically any way imaginable
- Summarize massive amounts of data and aggregate values in ways which satisfy most every need
- Send data to every common (and some not-so-common ones too) electronic file format in use today
- Provide tools to audit every single modification that’s been made to a data acquisition and manipulation model
- Save duplication of effort by easily reusing data tools that had already been created for other purposes, and even
- Prepare charts to help visualize your data
All of these can be done without any significant or special knowledge about information systems and without any knowledge of programming or query languages such as SQL.
But if you are able to write program code, or even small scripts, you can do yet more with Monarch by automating the work that you would do with it manually.
When you add Excel to Monarch, you add the final layer of the package. Excel isn’t the tool that transforms Monarch from being a lump of coal into a beautiful diamond, but rather Excel is the gold ring that secures the Monarch diamond and makes it easy for others to see what to them is Monarch’s hidden beauty. Excel is what enables you to polish the presentation of your work before you share it so that you and your efforts get the attention and recognition that’s deserved.
Monarch’s Tools Constantly Improve
The features that are built into Monarch continue to evolve with every version of the software, and in between releases we can combine our creativity with Monarch’s existing flexibility to create new tools to make the most of all by ourselves.
As much as I’d like to have a truckload of stunning guitars to play, I’m happy to say that my tools are much more portable, even if they don’t sound nearly as nice. Still, your work can be just like beautiful music when you excel with Monarch.
