Escaping Excel Hell Without Abandoning Excel

by | Mar 16, 2015 | Business Intelligence (BI), Ms Excel, PowerOLAP

Escape Excel Hell

A new project always sounds exciting. With all the numbers and financials flowing in, your natural instinct is always to resort to Excel for managing your data. The next thing you know there is a team of people coordinating Excel entries into the same spreadsheet. With time, more data flows in and before long, you are swamped with a spider’s web of spreadsheets. These spreadsheets are linked to many other spreadsheets to track changes being made by different people at the same time in an attempt to maintain the “Latest Version” of the data. You then realize there are multiple copies of same document with various different numbers floating around. Various versions of the truth is Excel Hell!

Wouldn’t life be simpler if you had that one tool which presented one version of the truth and quickly? Indeed, Business Intelligence tools have been designed to address this issue of what to do when you reach the limits of Excel. Such tools allow you to continue working in Excel as your front-end, which reduces the learning curve of using a new product and increases the chances of the tool actually being adopted by users. These add-ins are a way of escaping Excel Hell without abandoning Excel.

PowerOLAP is one such tool that allows you to work with Excel spreadsheets, this tool really goes beyond a typical “add-in” because it transforms Excel from a static number-keying interface to a real-time spreadsheet that is dynamically integrated with both your relational database and an optimized multidimensional database for a fast, powerful, flexible single application. It transforms your Microsoft Excel spreadsheet into a real-time dashboard with full functionality of performing data entry, planning, analysis and data reporting. It is not just Excel spreadsheets that can be dynamically connected with PowerOLAP, but also with any other front-end of your choice— be it Google Docs, SAP Business Objects, Tableau, QlikView, or a web browser.

Whether you choose PowerOLAP or another tool to make your life easier, do a little research to see if the tool you are about to invest in can bring all the pieces of your data management system together, deliver real-time data in seconds from the database, and integrate with end-user tools besides Excel.  The way to escape Excel Hell certainly lies in maintaining one version of instantly updated truth—all the way from Excel to the relational database and back out again into any front-end.

YOUR data made available to YOU quickly and accurately.

Learn more about PowerOLAP.

[Originally posted Sept. 30, 2013]