Driving Your Data to the Finish Line
You’ve worked hard to mine data from your reports. You’ve used calculated fields and external lookups to add value to your base data. You then used filters to isolate the most important data from the mountain of information you have at your disposal.
How are you going to present your newfound decision-making data to your management so that it will be seen as being prepared professionally and accurately? While we know that it’s not always true, we all recognize that a pretty package is more easily accepted than one that isn’t quite so presentable. So what are you going to do? How are you going to package your information so that it will be best accepted?
Nobody wants to sift through reams of raw data manually. Ideally, they want the big picture and the ability to drill down into various levels of details if required.
To that end, Monarch’s ability to create multiple summaries of your data is a fantastic feature of the product. There are a number of tools available to customize your summaries and prepare unique views of the data and give your summary you own tailored look. You can even export to Excel in a manner which simulates drill-down ability by opting to include the Auto-Outline feature.
If You Already Own Both Cars, Which Do You Drive?
Excel also has a tool which summarizes data nicely: the pivot table. In fact, comparing the Excel pivot table to the Monarch summary is like comparing Ferrari’s F340 to Honda’s Civic. They’re both automobiles and will get you from A to B, but their similarities pretty much end right there.
Excel’s pivot table feature is a very powerful device, and as is often the case, with powerful tools come some amount of complexity. Unfortunately this scares some folks away from using them.
A pivot table can be the foundation for your best presentation practices. Just as the best writers consider their audience, the formatting and layout of the final report is best done with its users in mind.
Think not only about what content they need, but how is it best presented. How are they going to use and interact with it? Even something as seemingly insignificant as your font selection can make a huge impact on readability and, more importantly, how receptive your audience is to your report. After all, we’re not getting any younger!
You can add some of Excel’s other features to your report to:
- highlight important data,
- show only as much or as little data as is needed,
- create visual differences between groups of data, and
- alternatively, use devices to create logical groupings.
One of the great things about pivot tables is their reusability. Once you’ve built a table, especially a somewhat complex table, you can reuse it each time you’ve generated new data.
Perhaps most importantly, you can automate all of your final presentation steps, including regenerating the table based on your freshly extracted data.
Racing to Win
If you’ve decided that your final report needs all kinds of manual tweaking and formatting after Excel generates your table, you can virtually eliminate the time it takes for you to produce the final product. Imagine converting stressful work under a deadline to effortless results.
As a final point, pivot tables allow the user of the report to dynamically filter the content of the table themselves, easily, which further enhances the value of your report in their mind. After all, there’s a very good chance that your reader has no idea how you create this magic in the first place. They just know that they can always count on you to regularly supply them with what they need.
Being adept at creating custom reports based on pivot tables which summarize data that you’ve extracted from reports is a great way for you to excel with Monarch.
