Several weeks ago I got my first look at Excel 12. Because I signed a non-disclosure agreement I can't tell you anything about the product, or even my first reactions to it.

However, I can quote other published information, like the Raikes quote above. It was posted in a July 28 article at CRN.com.

For now, enough said.

Dashboards for Investors...What Would You Like to See?

About 600 people have requested sample dashboards of public companies. Because many people have requested the same companies, you'll find dashboards for less than 200 of them at the link. These samples are Excel-generated bitmaps that present data about those public companies from a manager's perspective.

But several weeks ago a visitor urged me to create an Excel dashboard report for investors. Rather than merely illustrating Excel dashboards, as the samples do, he urged me to create a useful tool.

I've researched this idea, and the raw data seems to be available. But creating this solution would take some development effort, and I'm not sure of the market. So I'm hoping you can advise me about this project.

If you're an investor, what information would you like to see in a one- or two-page dashboard report about a public company? What Excel data would you like to have for your own analysis? And most important, why don't current sources for such information satisfy your needs?

If you have any ideas or suggestions about this topic, please send them my way.

Excel Dashboards vs Xcelsius

On many pages at ExcelUser.com you'll see an ad for Xcelsius, made by Infommersion. At first glance it's easy to miss the differences between Xcelsius dashboards and Excel dashboards.

My Excel Dashboard Kit teaches you how to create Excel-only dashboards for very flexible and readable reporting. But Xcelsius gives you the power to create interactive dashboard Flash files from Excel data, dashboards that can be used in surprising ways.

Xcelsius can, of course, create interactive dashboards that can be used on the web or in Excel. But you also can use Xcelsius dashboards in...

...PowerPoint, where you can interact with them during a presentation. This would allow you to show the performance of different branches or products in response to questions from the audience. And it would allow the audience to volunteer values to use in a graphical calculator.

...PDF Files, where your readers could interact with the data from within their documents. For example, a PDF-based management report could include an Analysis by Region that allows readers to explore measures of performance for various locations.

...Email, where a Daily Executive Report could allow selected managers to explore month-to-date performance for the data that most interests them.

Excel as a Business-Intelligence Tool

I recently read an excellent white paper, "Keeping IT Sane In a Crazy BI World Of Excel," by Keith Gile, Principal Analyst of Forrester Research. But he stated, without explanation, that "Excel is not a BI tool."

Intrigued, I found this definition for Business Intelligence at Informatica.com: "Business intelligence (BI) is a category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing, statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining."

I've helped companies do all those things with Excel. I even did many of those things with VisiCalc. So why, I asked the author, does Excel fail to qualify as a BI tool?

"I agree that Excel is being used as a BI tool," he wrote, "but that doesn’t make it a BI tool. Much in the way a rock can be used to strike a nail, but the rock should not be confused with a hammer."

He said that Excel is not a BI tool for a number of reasons, particularly:

1. Lack of a central metadata repository for storing data and application definitions.
    
2. Lack of a server component for integrating the file storage, with the security and access rights available to users.
    
3. Inability to natively access data stores such as DB2, Oracle 9i/10g, Sybase, etc.

I agree that his first two points are important. This is why I'm such a fan of Excel-friendly OLAP, which solves both problems. I disagree about his third point, however. Dashboards can use data from any source, internal, external, or invented (as in budgets and forecasts). No BI system can provide native access to them all. Such access, therefore, seems to be merely a matter of convenience and marketing hype; it's not an intrinsic characteristic of BI.

But that set me to wondering how Excel users actually are using Excel as a BI tool. So I thought I'd ask. What do you like most and least about using Excel for BI? Can you recommend software that makes Excel a better BI tool? What change to Excel would make it a much better BI tool?

I hope you'll send me your thoughts about this topic. If you do, I won't quote you by name or company unless I have your permission. To respond, use this link.

By the way, Forrester charges $249 for this 17-page white paper. I'm trying to arrange a way to offer it for free from ExcelUser.com.

If I succeed, I'll let you know.

New At ExcelUser

To be honest, I haven't updated ExcelUser very much in recent weeks. But the dry spell is over.

Last week, I posted an article titled, "Three Ways to Reduce Errors In Spreadsheet SUM Formulas." The article was inspired by a well-publicized incident during the days that I wrote for LOTUS magazine. Because a contractor had made an error with a SUM formula in 1-2-3, he understated his costs, won the contract, lost his shirt, and sued Lotus.

This Monday, I posted "Predict Business Bankruptcy Using Z Scores with Excel." From an Excel point of view, the article is very simple, almost simplistic. But Z Scores -- and Z1 and Z2 Scores, which I also discuss -- can help you to estimate the financial health of a firm from a unique point of view.

In a few weeks I'll post a guest article that introduces MS Query. "About 95% of the time, after I had done a Crystal Report," the author writes, "the person I had done it for would say, 'Can I please have that in Excel? I want to be able to analyze the figures some more.'” Now, the author uses MS Query to pull data from Oracle directly into Excel. In the article, however, he illustrates MS Query techniques by pulling data from other Excel workbooks and from text files.

Soon, I plan to post my first VBA article for ExcelUser. It's inspired by the horrible examples of VBA code that I've seen at many companies. Most of the bad examples, but not all of them, were written by Excel users. My working title is, "Corporate VBA Standards For Excel Users." The article will discuss documentation and other techniques that can help Excel users write code that other Excel users can understand.

And some time soon I'll post another article about dashboards. I'll show how to set up very unusual traffic lights in an Excel dashboard. Rather than merely using a red, yellow, or green arrow as a traffic light, I'll show how to display a tiny but readable chart. Using this approach will help you to avoid a problem that gauges also have, as I described in "Down With Gauges!"