Over the last few months I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the most recent addition to Vancouver’s radio dial, Shore 104, and their focus on “Roots, Rock & Rhythm”. It’s great stuff, and today it provides both the soundtrack and the basis for this last entry in the 30 Days to Become a Better Monarch Modeler series.

If you’re one of the many who have accompanied me on this journey to improve our skills, we’ve covered a lot of ground over the last while. If we can take a moment to recap the series, by day:

1. 30 Days to Become a Better Monarch Modeler: the series is launched, and we decided to plan our adventures and projects.
2. Learn to Build Traps: a review of the tools available for building data extraction templates.
3. Understanding Template Types: a review of the different types of extraction templates and the purpose of each.
4. Extracting Data from Multi-column Regions: a discussion of how Monarch can handle newspaper style columns within a report.
5. Defining Fields in Monarch: getting comfortable with Monarch’s data types, and the tools available for locating and isolating data within a report.
6. Monarch’s Rich History: a recap of the resources available to learn tips and tricks about Monarch, and reasons that you’d want to do so.
7. Breaking All The Rules: how, and why, to customize the defaults provided for our Monarch environment.
8. Mastering Monarch’s Calculated Fields: developing or reinforcing our knowledge of the different types of fields that Monarch offers to add to our extracted data.
9. Mastering Monarch’s Table Window Controls and Layout: using the display and navigation options for maximum benefit.
10. Employing Functions for Specialized Tasks: how to put Monarch’s internal functions to work for us.
11. Monarch’s Address Block Wizard: transforming detailed and difficult to handle address data magically with Monarch.
12. Finding Critical Data with Monarch: building easy to manage filters to isolate key information.
13. A to Z Monarch: how and why to build and use multiple sort definitions within a single model.
14. A Summary Synopsis: an overview of Monarch data aggregation facility.
15. A Challenging Reinforcement: a real-life challenge that required the implementation of many of the previously discussed concepts to resolve.
16. Creating New Opportunities With Monarch: compelling reasons to combine disparate data sources with Monarch.
17. Share Your Story with Monarch: in order to distribute our data with others, we’d best be well versed in exporting it to many different formats
18. Reusable Monarch: avoid duplicating effort when building Monarch models by incorporating aspects of models that have already been completed.
19. Embedding Documentation for Better Monarch Models: clarify reasons and intentions by making models self-documenting.
20. Monarch is the Solution to Fiscal Year Troubles: capitalize on Monarch’s flexibility to easily report periodic data any way that we please.
21. Easy Ways to Benefit from Automating Monarch: some of the simpler methods with which we can automate the work that we perform with Monarch.
22. 10 Ways to Improve a Monarch Model: a selection of potential enhancements to any Monarch model.
23. How Excel Can Make You a Better Monarch Modeler: take advantage of Excel’s complement of interactive features and functions to add value to models.
24. Search for Opportunities to Excel with Monarch: expanding our horizons by actively seeking challenges provided by others within our groups.
25. Learn to Recognize the Impossible: some of the options available to us when we encounter challenges for which we have no immediate answers.
26. Consult with Peers and Become a Better Monarch Modeler: learn from the modeling works of others.
27. Learn, Lead, and Understand: teaching new Monarch users what it’s all about reinforces our strengths and exposes our deficiencies.
28. Focus Your Command of Monarch: applying everything that we know about building Monarch solutions to develop dashboard reporting systems.
29. Learn to Program Excel to Become a Better Monarch Modeler: leverage our knowledge of programming and automation to build better Monarch models.

All of this brings us to the final entry in the series, which I hope will make it abundantly obvious to you – if you have any doubt at all – that you’ve already become a better Monarch modeler. Enough preamble. Let’s get to it, shall we?

Your Task for Today

While there still other ways that you can become a better Monarch modeler, I’ve selected the ones that I’d felt were most important to share with you. Today you’ll discover the importance of the last idea for yourself.

Go back in time and revisit your own roots. Have a look at your initial Monarch models, and if it’s of any current benefit, use what you now know to improve them.

What kinds of things do you do differently now then you did then, if anything? Do you have better ways to build traps? Do you take advantage of more of Monarch’s features now? Are you doing more now within Monarch to analyse the data that you compile with your newer models than you did before?

You’ve come a long way from what was likely a humble beginning with the software, and I’m certain that you’re more in control of Monarch than ever before and are ready to take full advantage of everything that Monarch offers, or have a better understanding of what that entails.

Monarch Rocks!

I’ve had a lot of fun developing this series, and I hope that you’ve found it to be beneficial and perhaps even entertaining.

The work doesn’t end here though, I’m afraid, now that you’ve become a better Monarch modeler. In fact, it just begins anew. But you should now have a solid foundation to accomplish whatever it is that you personally need to accomplish. Additionally, it ought to be much easier for you to adapt to the updates in the software tools that we use.

Well done! You’re now prepared for a future in which you can always excel with Monarch.