The Greatest Pair of the 21st Century!

Macaroni and cheese. Lennon and McCartney. Peanut butter and jelly. Penn and Teller. On their own, they’re good. They’re very good. But together, it’s magic.

And so it is with Microsoft Excel and Datawatch Corporation’s Monarch. Individually, they’re terrific examples of successful software. Use them together and you’ve got a fantastic tool for business intelligence. Indeed, if you have any need whatsoever for organizing, analyzing or presenting data, with which you and your organization can make informed decisions, this is the solution you’ve been looking for.

Hi, and with this, our first post, we welcome you to Excel with Monarch, the web’s first and only site dedicated to both Microsoft Excel and Datawatch’s Monarch.

My name is Sandy Cavalaris and this site is going to be about how you can get the most of out of Excel and Monarch, both individually and together. Especially together.

What’s a spreadsheet?

OK, I know that you are not asking that question. By now, I think most people know what a spreadsheet is and how to use it. Most people know how to do what they need to do with Excel. But you’re not most people. You know that you can do, in fact should do, more with Excel than you do now, and you suspect that you might be able to do some things better than you do now.

You’re right. In fact, Excel is far more than a spreadsheet. It’s one of the best solution development systems available. With it you can do everything from balancing your checkbook to building an executive dashboard reporting system for a multinational organization.

What’s Monarch?

That’s probably a fair question, because my experience tells me that most people don’t know the name. Not just everyday people, but people who ought to be using it. That’s unfortunate, so you and I are going to change that.

I love Monarch. There, I said it. It’s out. Everybody knows it now. But more importantly, you should too. Monarch can help you change your existing reports and other data sources into living, breathing, beautiful things. OK, that’s a bit too poetic, but you get the idea.

Excel does some pretty nice things for you too, and one of the things it does best is crunch a lot of data. Nothing will feed Excel fresh data better than Monarch. Nothing.

That’s a pretty strong statement. Why would I say such a thing? Because with Monarch, you can do it yourself. You don’t need an IT team at your disposal. You don’t need to know a lot about databases or programming. In fact, you don’t need any programming. You just need to know how to get started.

Soon you’ll be doing some pretty sophisticated things. Things you never thought that you’d be able to do. If you do a lot of work with data, your new Monarch skills might even advance your career.

We’re going to talk about the tools and features of the software you’ll be using: pivot tables, filters, functions, templates, fields, exporting, importing, lookups, even Boolean logic, and more. Why we need these things, how to use them, and best practices for all of it. And you need to contribute to the conversation too. We’ll all learn from one another. So post your comments, your questions, even your advice. How you best use the terrific software combination of Monarch and Excel.

So with that in mind, our goal, simply put, is to help you excel with Monarch.

I hope you enjoy reading, and contributing to, Excel with Monarch.