Ambika Aggarwal, Author at XLCubed Blog

Lessons from IBCS – Maintaining Visual Integrity

Ambika Aggarwal/ 14th August 202014th August 2020/ Charting & Visualisation, IBCS

When reading reports and dashboards, we often find ourselves spending more time than we’d expect analysing the charts and tables tying to comprehend the data. In many cases that’s due to inconsistencies in the presentation, or poor design. Ideally a report should convey the message clearly and quickly.

One of the underlying rules of IBCS is maintaining visual integrity; this forms the ‘Check’ component of IBCS’s ‘SUCCESS’ formula. It requires reports and dashboards to present information in the most truthful and easily understood way. This involves avoiding misleading visuals including improper scaling and manipulated representations. When interpreting data, information that looks the same should also mean the same. Consistency is important and helps users to understand the report quickly and easily.

Updating SQL Tables from Excel

Ambika Aggarwal/ 5th March 20205th March 2020/ Data, Reporting & Analytics

Most of our customers use XLCubed for reporting, analysis and data visualisation, but an increasing number use it for data updates, either within budgeting and forecasting solutions or in niche applications.

XL3RunSQL is a neat method for running SQL updates from Excel, and allows users to build input forms (which can ultimately be web-enabled) quickly and easily.

In this blog, we will walk through the steps to set this up.

Rolling Actual and Forecast Reporting

Ambika Aggarwal/ 27th August 201921st April 2020/ Reporting & Analytics

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.

The Challenge

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.

XLCubed Grid in Excel showing Actual and Forecast Data for all 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”

Usage Metrics in XLCubed

Ambika Aggarwal/ 22nd July 201923rd July 2019/ Reporting & Analytics

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:

What reports are being published?
How many reports have been updated?
How long are they taking to open?
Who is publishing the reports?
Which reports are not being used?

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.

Optimizing Excel Reports on Mobile Devices

Ambika Aggarwal/ 15th May 20195th November 2019/ Dashboard Design, Publication & Distribution

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.

XLCubed: A Beginner’s Advice

Ambika Aggarwal/ 2nd May 20192nd May 2019/ Dashboard Design, Grid & Report Formatting

I have been working with XLCubed for approximately two weeks now and when I first started, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had come from a Mathematics background and so had no in-depth technical IT background.

Over the last two weeks, my main priority has been to get to know XLCubed like the back of my hand. At first, I was advised to run through all the XLCubed YouTube Tutorials and I must admit, it was a nice way to start learning this brand-new software. The videos were not complicated and gave a good introduction to all the different features. While watching the videos, I would try and recreate some of the things shown in the video such as grids and slicers, etc. and so was able to get a good feel for the software. However, the videos alone were not enough to get a full grasp of XLCubed and this was where the Partner Packs came in very useful. These are sample reports we provide for our partner network, and the steps to build them are documented.

Continue reading “XLCubed: A Beginner’s Advice”