5 Ways to Advance Your Spreadsheets

You don’t have to ditch your spreadsheets all together, but integrating them into a more robust analysis with better visualizations is easier than you think.

When asking the many questions you have of your big data, you’ll need the freedom and flexibility to explore your answers in different ways. In today’s marketplace, the basic, built-in charts and graphs are just table stakes, and the real data wins are found in multiple types of advanced visuals.

In order to make fast, data-driven decisions, you’ll need to go beyond spreadsheets to explore what’s really happening across many sets of data, correlate patterns across multiple metrics, and provide summaries with in-depth views of performance.

Read this whitepaper to learn five critical ways to do more with your spreadsheets and data analysis.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn about:

• Using all of your data, no matter how big or where it lives
• Seeing the complete picture with data blending and cleaning
• Four powerful ways to improve data visualizations
• Fast, interactive and shareable dashboards
• Real-time data and automatic updates

We've also pulled out the first several pages of the whitepaper for you to read. Download the PDF on the right to read the rest.

Great Hammer, Lousy Screwdriver

Data analysis becomes more important every moment of every day. For many, Excel is the go-to analysis tool of choice. But as useful as it can be, it just can’t do it all. With pressure mounting to glean more insight from your data, spreadsheets don’t always have the capabilities to deliver the insight you seek. The good news? There are plenty more tools in the box.

Integrate All of Your Data

Regardless of the size of your organization, chances are, you’ve got data everywhere, and a lot of it. It’s not just living in spreadsheets anymore, but it’s also stored in the cloud, and in on-premise data warehouses. It’s called big data for a reason. Social media data, transactional data, customer records, and web analytics are just a few examples of mushrooming information that can’t be properly analyzed in a spreadsheet. Excel and Google users often find themselves forced to use subsets of data for ad hoc analysis—which will only yield a glimpse of the answers they seek. The reality is, with just a spreadsheet, at a million rows, you’re going to hit a brick wall.

Whether you’re filling your spreadsheet to its breaking point or working with smaller data sets, running sophisticated macros and calculations in a spreadsheet can often bring a program to its knees—leaving you waiting and miserable. You are too busy to spend cycles sorting out which set of data you can live without or budgeting time to refresh your calculations.

Data Blending and Cleaning

A typical quarterly report might include data exported from your CRM system, more data extracted from your sales database, and yet more data posted by your finance team. With spreadsheets, you may spend hours on each set of data trying to connect the dots, making them seem unified, and then pasting them into a presentation.

There is a better way. The answer is combining or blending data from multiple sources.