When you start using Excel business intelligence tools you’ll realize that they enable connecting with data from multiple sources. This can be an Excel spreadsheet or text files, databases, data from the Internet, data warehouse “in the cloud” … If you have ever used MS Access, you will easily understand how to add and link tables within the model. If not, read this article and you will see that it is easy and quite intuitive task.
Data model is used to add and connect tables in a whole, in order to retrieve the data needed for reporting. This is a pseudo-base, part of Excel document. By adding a table into the Model data are automatically compressed; later, when we need them for reporting, they are decompressed and used as a reporting dimension in the pivot table. Data model is basis for use of “Power” technologies, i.e. “self-service” business intelligence tools.
The catalog is a list of items associated with prices that and, by rule, it should not be changed more than once a day. In practice it is formed by consecutive adding codes of items, dates and prices in the table. How to find the last (current) price? Although at first glance it seems simple, this can be a considerable brain teaser. Also, this is an excellent demonstration of the practical application of formulas containing arrays and one of the “recipes” you will surely like.
In one of the earlier „recipes“ I briefly described the statistical functions in Excel. My knowledge of statistics is quite modest (one of these days will probably take some additional lessons to improve my knowledge). However, I would like to dedicate one article to this area. On a practical case, the analysis of wages in a small company, I’ll show you how you can use these functions to make you come up with some interesting conclusions.
When making Marketing Plan one of the activities being carried out is the analysis of competition. How strong is our competition? There are several ways to find this out, and this is perhaps most easily accomplished by tracking revenue and profit of competitors over several years. The following text will show you several Excel charts which should show where is our company and where are competitors on the market.