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Published Now and Again for Business Users of Microsoft Excel.
Nightmare Reports
+ Free Dashboards
Charley Kyd
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
If you like this newsletter, please forward it to
other Excel users.
An overworked accounting manager wrote me recently with an
interesting question.
She works for a VP of a well-known movie studio. Each month,
she spends long hours extracting data from several sources. Then she
consolidates, sorts, summarizes, and reports it. She wondered if I could suggest
ways to reduce her Excel work. In fact, I could. Years ago, I
developed many spreadsheet techniques
for doing similar things while I was the CFO of a small electronics company. It
turns out that the same techniques probably will simplify her reporting process
This got me to thinking...
As both a consultant and a working accountant, I've developed many ways to
simplify Excel reporting and analysis. But I've been doing this for so long that
I no longer can tell which techniques are obvious and which are not. And I'm not
sure what problems are particularly challenging these days.
Therefore, if your Excel reports take a long time to prepare each day or week
or month, please send me your samples. If you
start with text files or spreadsheets generated by some other system, include those files as well. Of course,
include an example of your completed
report along with any descriptions you think I might need about your reporting
challenges.
If I can get a lot of reporting problems to work with, I'll develop some
common solutions. I'll discuss some of these at ExcelUser and put many more
solutions into an ebook.
You're probably concerned about your company-private information. You can change your data,
if you want, or send it to me as it is. In either case, I'll disguise both your
data and your company name if I write about your reports.
The more examples of Spreadsheet Hell that I receive, the more likely it is
that I'll be able to offer solutions to your own problems with Excel reporting
and analysis.
So please encourage other Excel users to help with this project; encourage them to send me
examples of their Excel nightmares.
Obviously, this project will take some time. If I get enough samples to make
this project worthwhile you should start to see a return on your investment by
Summer.
Send me your
Excel nightmares today!
Free Dashboard Reports! New and Improved!
For the past year or so I've been offering free dashboard reports of the financial
performance of public companies. But these reports have had several problems,
which I've now fixed.
First, the reports used data that I updated about every six months. So the
information typically was out of date.
Second, the figures showed only five quarters of data. This was because
Hoovers.com, my previous source, provides data for only five quarters and three
fiscal years.
I've finally fixed both of these problems. Today, when I generate a
dashboard report about a public company, I generate the report in real time,
using the current data found at
MoneyCentral.com.
Also, because MoneyCentral provides five years of annual reports and five
quarters of quarterly reports, my reports now
display the most-recent 15 quarters of data. It's amazing how using this additional history gives a
much better perspective of a company's financial performance.
Third, the reports were only in color. A reader recently pointed out that
this is a problem because most people in business use only monochrome laser printers. Therefore, I'm now providing two dashboards, one in color
and the other in black and white.
If you'd like to receive this pair of reports about a public company, here's what
to do:
Go to this link, enter your
contact information, and then, to specify your report, enter the public
company's name and ticker symbol in the Comments section. I'll send you the
dashboard report soon.
Oh...I'll be speaking to a bunch of management accountants in Reno later this week,
so it might be a few days before you get a response.
New At ExcelUser
I've added two articles in recent days.
Excel Range-Name
Roundup summarizes a variety of very useful ways that you can use Excel's
names. I guarantee that you'll learn something new in this article.
For example, did you know that you could define a name that always refers to
the cell above the cell in which the name is used? That name works great for
summing columns of data.
And did you know that you can
define dynamic names that shrink and grow in response to the amount of data in
your spreadsheet? Among other benefits, this technique allows you to define a
dynamic Print Area.
This article explains these uses, and more.
Explore Business Performance Using Small Charts in Excel
uses actual financial data from five manufacturers to illustrate the
benefits of using small charts and other small figures for management reporting.
I illustrate the article using dashboard reports of the five competing
companies. The article provides links to five workbooks that contain the full dashboard reports
for each of those companies.
Looking Ahead
I'm trying to maintain a split personality here at ExcelUser. On the one
hand, I offer hands-on articles that explain how to use Excel more effectively.
But I also try to step back from the nitty-gritty of Excel to address some of
the broader issues that managers face when they use (or ought to use) Excel for
reporting, analysis, budgeting, and forecasting.
The two new articles at ExcelUser illustrate both personalities.
Recently, I've been reading books and articles that discuss the state of the
art in BI (Business Intelligence). The common wisdom seems to be that companies
should rely only on BI systems controlled by their IT department. With this
approach, users would abandon Excel, and instead, passively enjoy the bountiful
information resources that IT can provide. That bounty can be delivered Real
Soon Now, if IT has a sufficiently large budget.
That idea can be dangerous to your company's financial health, as I'll
explain next month. My working title for one of the articles is, "Do You Really
Want Business Advice From Programmers?"
Enough for now.
More later,
Charley
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