It’s Backwards Day!

If you have school aged children, you may have heard of “Backwards Day”. It’s a special day for the children to wear their clothes inside out or backwards, sing songs and read books backwards, and generally have a lot of fun.

When I heard about it, I though that I might very well be missing out by not doing some of my work backwards too. Hold on, I haven’t lost my mind entirely.

Does your Excel work require that you repeatedly use the Auto-Filter to narrow down your data to find your exceptions? Do you use conditional formatting to help you find important values? Do you build a number of pivot tables to summarize your data?

These are all perfectly valid ways of using Excel for analysis work. In fact, these approaches are some of the best ways to use Excel that you should be utilizing, and we’ll soon discuss these techniques in more detail. It’s even better to do this type of work on data that you exported from Monarch in the first place.

Or is it?

What if you didn’t export the data to Excel from Monarch? Perhaps you were supplied the Excel data by someone else.

What if you turned the tools backwards, and used Excel as your data source and Monarch as your analysis tool? When you use Monarch Pro you can use an Excel file as a database - a data source. Why would you want to do such a thing when analysis is what Excel was made to do?

There are quite a few things that you can do much more easily, and more rapidly, with Monarch than you’ll be able to with Excel.

The right tool for the job.

It terms of filtering or querying the data, you have a number of choices with Excel. You can use a number of specialty database functions like DSUM and DCOUNT. You can use the Auto Filter or Advanced Filters.

When you use the Auto Filter you often set the filters for multiple columns, narrowing down the selections as you go. Then to change the “search criteria” that you’ve built, it can be a confusing mess to see which columns have been filtered and which haven’t. So what do you do? Turn off the filters and turn them back on, and then get to setting new filters all over again.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily define and store reusable complex filtering conditions in Excel and even name them like you can in Monarch? So why aren’t you doing that work with Monarch?

Not only can you build simple or complex filtering, but you name each filter clearly and meaningfully, and quickly switch between filters too!

Why are you making things difficult for yourself with the cumbersome version of filtering found in Excel? It’s good for quick and dirty work. Use the right tool for the job.

“But I need to build a bunch of small pivot tables and pack them together on a sheet for quick review,” you say.

No problem. Build a bunch of Monarch summaries. It’s just as quick to build small summaries as it is small pivots, and they’re nicely named too. Then just copy and paste them into an Excel sheet and format it a bit to make it look good.

Summaries also allow you do a lot of other calculations beside simple sums. You can calculate averages, minimums, maximums and more. You can even build custom expressions using aggregate functions.

When defining Monarch summaries, the Matching tab gives you far more power and ease of use than you can easily duplicate in Excel. The Coloring and Limits tab gives you functionality similar to Excel’s conditional formatting, if not as powerful. Let’s face it: Monarch doesn’t win every time.

Monarch will let you easily sort your data six ways from Sunday. You can add your own custom calculations and external lookups to help you scrutinize your data that much more.

You can even chart your data with Monarch for a quick visualization. While Monarch’s charts aren’t truly of presentation quality, they can be useful.

Sometimes working backwards really can be the best way to move forward and excel with Monarch.