By Michael Alexander & John Walkenbach

Introduction

Business intelligence (BI) is what you get when you analyze raw data and turn that
information into actionable knowledge. BI can help an organization identify cost-cutting
opportunities, uncover new business opportunities, recognize changing business environments,
identify data anomalies, and create widely accessible reports.
The BI concept is overtaking corporate executives who are eager to turn impossible amounts of
data into useful knowledge. As a result of this trend, software vendors who focus on BI and build
dashboards are coming out of the woodwork. Dashboards are ideal mechanisms for delivering
this targeted information in a graphical, user-friendly form. New consulting firms touting their
BI knowledge are popping up virtually every week. And even the traditional enterprise solution
providers like Business Objects and SAP are offering new BI capabilities presented in a dashboard
format.
So maybe you’ve been hit with dashboard fever? Or maybe you are holding this book because
someone is asking you to create BI solutions (that is, create a dashboard) in Excel.
Although many IT managers would scoff at the thought of using Excel as a BI tool to create your
dashboard, Excel is inherently part of the enterprise BI tool portfolio. Whether IT managers are
keen to acknowledge it or not, most of the data analysis and reporting done in business today is
done by using a spreadsheet program. We see several significant reasons to use Excel as the
platform for your dashboards and reports. They are, as follows:
􀁨 Familiarity with Excel: If you work in corporate America, you are conversant in the “language”
of Excel. You can send even the most seasoned senior vice president an Excelbased
presentation and trust he will know what to do with it. With an Excel dashboard,
your users spend less time figuring how to use the tool and more time viewing the data.
􀁨 Built-in flexibility: With most enterprise dashboards, the ability to analyze the data outside
of the predefined views is either disabled or unavailable. In Excel, features such as
pivot tables, drop-down lists, and other interactive controls (such as a check box) don’t
lock your audience into one view. And because an Excel workbook contains multiple
worksheets, the users have space to add their own data analysis as needed.
􀁨 Rapid development: Using Excel to build your own dashboards can liberate you from
assorted resource and time limitations from within an organization. With Excel, you can
develop dashboards faster, and adapt more quickly to changing business requirements.
􀁨 Powerful data connectivity and automation capabilities: Excel is not the toy application
some IT managers make it out to be. With its own native programming language and its
robust object model, Excel can help to automate certain processes and even connect
with various data sources. With a few advanced techniques, your dashboard can practically
run on its own.
􀁨 Little to no incremental costs: Not all of us can work for multi-billion dollar companies
that can afford enterprise-level reporting solutions. In most companies, funding for new
computers and servers is limited, let alone funding for expensive dashboard software
packages. For those companies, Excel is frankly the most cost-effective way to deliver
key business reporting tools without compromising too deeply on usability and function.
Excel contains so many functions and features that it’s difficult to know where to start. Enter your
humble authors, spirited into your hands via this book. Here, we show you how you can turn
Excel into your own personal BI tool. With a few fundamentals and some of the new BI functionality
Microsoft has included in this latest version of Excel, you can go from reporting