Have you seen some of what is soon to be available in the upcoming release of Excel 2010? Microsoft has produced some videos to demonstrate the new abilities of the software.
But before I share those with you, I thought that I’d include their “History of Business Intelligence”. While a little lengthy, it’s cute, entertaining and informative, and is a pretty good recap of what’s happened with this topic to date. Watch the video to see how the Terminator, Donkey Kong and gophers played a role in getting us to where we’re at today.
History of Business Intelligence
Sparklines
Sparklines are small charts that help convey trends. Many Excel users have been taking advantage of sparklines by using tools such as BonaVista System’s excellent Microcharts, but Microsoft has addressed this need and deficiency in their software by incorporating this visual analysis tool into Excel 2010.
Slicers
Other products such as Tableau have been making it easy to dynamically filter the data included in tables and charts for a while, and slicers are Microsoft’s version of more interactive filtering. Up until now we’ve been able to filter content with Autofilters and pivot table page fields, but the major improvement offered by the new slicers is in how the secondary filter levels change dynamically based on the initial selection. Have a look:
The Impact of Excel 2010 on Monarch Modelers
Monarch v10’s ability to export summaries, especially when using key values to create individuals worksheets, in conjunction with sparklines will make quick work of producing really useful trend charts in small spaces, maximizing the impact of your dashboard reports.
As Monarch modelers and solution builders, depending upon the requirements of the audience, we might be able to spend less time modeling – building fewer filters up front (in the model) – and instead take advantage of the large storage capacity of Excel (and Access) and have the end users filter their data on their own. Using slicers seems to be pretty straightforward, though your Excel users, at least initially, might appreciate your setting up the worksheet so that they can just click.
Based on how Monarch works with Excel 2007, I’ll assume (I know, I know… yes, I am speculating here) that being able to export data from Monarch to Excel 2010 files will be just as straightforward as it is with Excel 2007 and that we’ll be able to export pivot tables and take full advantage of slicers and sparklines, and the other new features that await us in Excel 2010.
Monarch and Excel Continue Working Together
As long as Excel needs structured data to analyze, then Monarch will always be the tool of choice to:
- organize unstructured data,
- consolidate data from multiple sources, and
- make that data accessible to Excel, either directly or indirectly.
Have you used the Excel 2010 beta software? If so, what were your impressions? I’m interested, clearly, but decided to focus on other tasks rather than test beta software. Nonetheless, by the looks of it, Excel 2010 will open up even more ways for us to excel with Monarch.
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I have been struggling with getting used to the ribbon bar on Excel 2007. I had not loaded the Office 2010 primarily because I didn’t need the additional learning curve. After this article I fired up the beta for 2010 and played a little bit with sparklines and slicers. So far I am very impressed. I am looking forward to this update of Office and the Monarch update that follows.