//Do you ever find yourself creating the same grid over and over again? Sometimes we want to add the same grid multiple times but with a few variations, or in different workbooks. This can be especially tiresome if the grid has complex member selections or if the underlying data model has a large number of dimensions and hierarchies.
Fortunately, XLCubed provides a simple and quick way to insert saved grids…
//This is a revised version of this post: Warning: Excel can get Volatile
Excel is a great tool for dashboard/report delivery and design (it’s why we created our addin in the first place!), but there is a hidden performance trap:
Offset, Now, Today, Cell, Indirect, Info and Rand
If you’ve ever used any of these formulae, you may have noticed that whenever you change a cell, or collapse/expand a data grouping, Excel recalculates. That is because these are VOLATILE formulae, as soon as you use one of these, Excel will enter a mode where everything is always recalculating, and for good reason.
Continue reading “Warning: Excel Can Get Volatile (revised)”
//We recently had a customer asking us for some assistance with a business challenge.
He had been asked to provide a report analysing their customer base by % contribution to company revenue. But that wasn’t all! He also had to produce an additional report that tracked the customers ‘lost’ by the company Year on Year by looking at sales activity.
This approach is also often used when looking at profitability, and many businesses like to classify their customers in this way:
This is where XLCubed’s capability and flexibility comes into play – we have an advanced selection mode for handling exactly this type of scenario.
Continue reading “Customer Segmentation By Revenue Contribution”
//It’s a very common requirement in financial reporting to show actual and forecast data by month across the entire year. Often, we are focusing on the expected year end position so we will want to use the actual data where it exists, and the forecast data where it doesn’t so that the year-end total becomes increasingly accurate through the year.
Excel is a flexible environment and people often build that type of report using a mixture of copy-paste and formulas. It achieves the goal but can be a cumbersome process needing quite a bit of manual amendment each month to update it.
When building this type of report the main challenge is normally that Actual and Forecast are two different measures, or members of a ‘scenario’ hierarchy. In most client reporting tools, reporting across multiple months will mean both actuals and forecast showing for every month where both exist, as shown below. In our case if completed actuals exist, that’s all we want to see, and then forecast for the remaining months.
We want our report to be dynamic so that we are not having to redesign it every time. In a previous blog from some years back, we showed you how to create the report using the “Keep – exclude from display” feature. While that approach still works, there is now a more intuitive way to achieve the same result using “Keep – Keep Members and Create Dynamic Set”
Continue reading “Rolling Actual and Forecast Reporting”
//This week’s blog is a quick tip on Grid formatting options. Did you know that XLCubed comes with ten pre-formatted grid styles which you can easily switch between?
These are available from the Workbook Format button on the XLCubed ribbon (the option remains greyed out until an XLCubed grid is added).
//With a wide range of reports being accessed and published daily, it is important for administrators and management to be able to keep abreast of their usage. Common questions are:
Our latest 9.2.47 release provides an updated version of the Usage Metrics Dashboard for XLCubed Web which gives visibility on the questions above and more.
Continue reading “Usage Metrics in XLCubed”
//Proper data visualisation is essential for digestible reports and dashboards. Business charting needs to not only portray a true representation of the data, but must also be intuitive and dynamic in its use. Any user should be able to click around or drill into the chart/report to find the view that they need.
XLCubed v9.2 introduced new and improved animated small multiple charts (read more in this blog). They are an excellent solution for displaying single and multiple charts that can be used both in Excel and Web. Here we will showcase some examples of how these can be used!
Continue reading “Interactive Charting In Excel and Web”
//We’ve previously shown how to setup Single sign on for Okta, and with V9.2.41 we have added support for Azure Active Directory. This includes using the “Application Roles” feature to control which Analysis Services role to use for each user/group.
Continue reading “Microsoft Azure AD Single Sign on with XLCubed Web”
//In this post we will walk through how to use XLCubed’s dashboard sheets to create a responsive dashboard within Excel, that will work on any device!
//Want to view your Excel report on a mobile device? Tired of having to zoom in on your data? Well then look no further, XLCubed has you covered!
With the XLCubed Mobile App, you can take your Excel reports with you. Workbooks published to XLCubed Web can be accessed by other users on any mobile or tablet device. Furthermore, with XLCubed’s dynamic dashboards, you can optimise the display for any size screen. This eliminates unusable cut-off screens, zoomed-out views, and large amounts of scrolling.
Creating a mobile accessible report from an existing Excel spreadsheet is easy to do. Here I will show you how quickly it can be done.
Continue reading