Congratulations! You’ve read every part of the 30 Days to Become a Better Monarch Modeler series, and now, hopefully, you’re much more accomplished and proficient than you were beforehand.

You’ve mastered defining templates. You can handle just about any kind of report layout that comes your way. You can add new fields that extend the usefulness of your extractions, and can narrow vast amounts of data to locate that which is most important and sort and order it any way you please. You can even connect multiple data sources and build summaries that let you gain much greater insight into what your data is trying to tell you. Sharing your findings has never been easier now that you can quickly control your data exports.

You now know how to harness an awful lot of data. What are you going to do with all that ability? You’ve pushed yourself reasonably hard lately, especially if you actually did all of the tasks that were assigned along the way (and good for you if you did!). So don’t let it all be for preparing the odd model here and there now.

On day 28, we’ll look at what I recommend you do with your talents; the venture with which you can possibly make the biggest impact on your organization.

Every organization ought to have a dashboard style information system. The best solution for ease of use and general access for a lot of simultaneous users might be those systems that come with hefty price tags that are directly connected to your organization’s main information system, and require a team of IT specialists to maintain and update.

But that doesn’t mean that those dashboard solutions are the best solutions or even the only available solutions for you. Many would argue that those tend to leave a lot to be desired, and that you can do better than that, perhaps even single-handedly.

Create Your Ultimate Dashboard with Excel

Of course, where there’s a problem, there’s generally a solution. And where there are solutions, there’s often competition and choice, so there are alternate solutions. Plenty of software vendors want to sell you their dashboard tools, including Datawatch’s latest offering, Datawatch Dashboards, which I’ve briefly written about previously.

You may well find that one of those solutions could be a good fit for your organization’s needs, but before you commit your resources you owe it to yourself to try a homemade system first.

The best thing that you can do for yourself is to stop seeing Excel as nothing but a collection of rows and columns. Instead, see it as the blank canvas that it is, awaiting your best design for what your organization needs to best measure and manage its metrics.

If you think that there’s just no way that a spreadsheet, a “what-if” tool, can function as a management tool, then I’d advise you to think again. There was a contest run back in 2006 on the BI Network site (download the scenario file if you’d to challenge yourself) which requested that participants create dashboards to satisfy the scenario criterion – using any tool they wish – and while there were many fine entries, the selected winner was built with Excel (and the BonaVista Systems MicroCharts Excel add-in.)

Simple, fast, and it works

Let me tell you a little story.

For some months I’d been publishing and distributing an entire package of financial information to a national management team. They really liked the format and weren’t particularly interested in pursuing an online dashboard information system, or in committing to the cost of its development and implementation to arrive at, in their minds, what they already had.

But I saw that there were opportunities to put more related information on a page. We had the business structured in such a way that I realized that I could devise a format, a presentation of the most critical information, for each of our departments and then just figure out how to update the data for each department. It all sounded so very possible.

At that point I had a pretty good handle on Excel, and my Monarch skills were coming along nicely I thought, and I did envision how I could build such a reporting system. But after hours of work, I realized that updating this system (a system that even then I believed to be approaching functional at best and the rickety work of a hack at worst) would take much, much too long every fiscal period. Time that I knew that I wouldn’t have.

Nobody that I worked with had ever constructed such a thing, so I began to search for the way answer. “Somebody out there must have documented something like this,” I thought.

It didn’t take too long before I discovered ExcelUser.com. I basically wasted the next few days pouring over the examples of dashboards and the other articles, thinking that I was a smart guy and that with my knowledge of Excel I could figure out what was between the lines and avoid getting out my credit card to pay for the advertised ebook which seemed to contain the answer I sought.

Finally, one Friday afternoon I saw the light and gave in. I read Charley Kyd’s ebook “Dashboard Reporting with Excel” and reviewed his sample files over the weekend. Busy with weekly reporting on Monday, I wasn’t able to start building my envisioned system “properly” until Tuesday.

By lunch on Thursday I was done, and for the next three years, the only change I made to that system each month was to update the data for each new fiscal period.

Of course I continue to use the basic techniques that Charley still teaches. When I first read his book, I envisioned how I could take advantage of specific Monarch abilities to tie in with his recommendations and make the job even easier than he’d described. Now with the enhancements found in Monarch v10, creating great Excel dashboard systems is easier still.

I recently constructed no less than seven different fully user-interactive dashboard report systems – each with the same basic layout, yet each is customized to provide different views of the business – in less than two days. I share that with you only because I suspect that you believe that this type of work is difficult and time-consuming.

I could go on and on, but it wouldn’t make any sense to you if you haven’t read “Dashboard Reporting with Excel”.

Even if you do decide that you should go with a major vendor’s solution, with the knowledge that you gain from your initial efforts, you’ll know exactly what your requirements are, and what presentations do and do not work for your group. It’s a really inexpensive investment and – please don’t share this with anyone – outright fun.

Do yourself a huge favor and just try it. With a satisfaction guarantee and refund policy, what have you got to lose?

Your Task for Today

If you haven’t already given it some thought, write down a list of the types of metrics, indicators and lists that you’d love to have on a single page. A combination of charts (for efficiently conveying trends) and tables is a good start. Perhaps you have different needs for different groups. Recall your consultations from earlier in the series. You have many opportunities to contribute to your organization.

Do a little research; your due diligence if you will. Find some major solution vendors online, and get your own numbers together. Find some impartial reviews of their products.

Now, equipped with some up to date information, go buy “Dashboard Reporting with Excel”. With the amount of effort that you’ve put into improving your Monarch skills, you owe it to yourself to expand your work in a directly related manner. Don’t do what I did. Get on with it. You’ll thank yourself and maybe me too.

The Future is Today

Naturally software progresses continuously, and given the market demand for the benefits that dashboard systems delivers, we’re bound to see plenty of improvements and new products sooner than later. I’m sure that our friends at Datawatch and Microsoft have great things in store for us.

But knowing what can be done right now, make today your future and start building cool and useful dashboard systems that exemplify your ability to excel with Monarch.

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Continue your commitment to Become a Better Monarch Modeler with Part 29 of the series, or review Part 27.