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The MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform
can provide your Microsoft® Excel users with seamless access
to corporate data. Excel is one of the most widely used office
productivity tools in the world. It is natural for business
users to want data and analysis in Excel. Yet organizations
often face significant security, administration, and maintenance
difficulties in deploying data access and analysis to hundreds
or thousands of distributed Excel users.
The MicroStrategy platform enables
organizations to deploy Excel-based reporting solutions that will
meet the needs of business users and IT departments. MicroStrategy
provides a variety of ways to leverage Microsoft Excel in your
everyday business operations – from delivery of personalized Excel
workbooks to your email inbox, to powerful ad hoc reporting and
analysis directly in Excel. Using Excel’s drag and drop PivotTable®
services and common business-defined terms, end users benefit
from running their own reports without detailed knowledge of the
underlying database schema. The IT department benefits from reduced
requests for one-off data queries and from centralized control of
database access, user administration, security, and data model changes.
Benefits
Intuitive End User Report Creation and Modification
Accessing data directly from Excel often requires detailed knowledge of
the physical database in order to create the appropriate query or report.
As a result, the IT department may be forced to take responsibility for
every new user request for data and in debugging end-users’ personal reports.
With the MicroStrategy platform and Excel, end users can create their own
reports to run directly against the database, without a detailed knowledge
of the physical database and without IT assistance. Using familiar Excel
PivotTables, end users can connect to the MicroStrategy platform and create
their own reports and analyses with business terms that they understand.
Standard, Reusable Reports and Business Definitions
One of the common problems organizations face in deploying Excel-based data
access is the lack of standardized and reusable reports and business definitions
to ensure a single, consistent version of the truth for all your users. With
the MicroStrategy platform, organizations can ensure that users are working
off of a common business model with a centrally managed set of definitions.
This shared set of definitions and reporting objects allows users to easily
reuse reports, metrics, and analyses that have been created by project developers
or other users. These common definitions ensure a single version of the truth and
help reduce errors in data analysis. For example, different parts of your
organization may unknowingly define “profitability” differently, with one
group incorrectly using gross profit in the calculation when net profit is
actually the corporate standard. With MicroStrategy’s reusable and centrally
managed reporting objects, your organization can avoid these costly errors and
ensure adherence to corporate standard business definitions.
Automated Delivery of Personalized Excel Workbooks
Many business users regularly look at a certain set of reports and analyses.
Instead of manually importing data into Excel each time they want updated
analysis, with MicroStrategy these users can receive formatted and personalized
Excel workbooks in their email inbox, with only the reports they want, when
they want them. Automating highly manual processes of creating and distributing
Excel workbooks can save significant time for your end users and your IT department,
resulting in increased value for your organization.
Insulation from Database Changes
In many Excel based deployments, changes to the physical database require changes
to reports on each individual user’s desktop. This can be a tremendous burden for
the IT staff supporting the Excel users. With the MicroStrategy platform’s solutions
for Excel, your end users are insulated from changes to the database. MicroStrategy’s
unified metadata allows changes to the database model to be made once and reflected
in all appropriate end user reports and queries.
Robust, Centralized Security and Administration
All your Excel users can be administered as a part of one, centralized system. Robust
data and object security can be applied centrally at the individual user or group level
and ensures users see only the data that is appropriate for them. MicroStrategy also
allows you to monitor and govern user and reporting patterns, enabling you to optimize
system performance.
Features
Personalized Delivery to your Email Inbox
MicroStrategy enables you to send personalized Excel workbooks to users’ email inboxes
according to a predefined schedule or based on certain events. Each Excel workbook
can contain multiple reports, and users can self subscribe to only the reports they
want to see. These capabilities allow you to automate common report distribution
processes and significantly reduce the time and personnel cost of populating and
distributing Excel based reports.
Access your MicroStrategy reports in Excel
Existing MicroStrategy reports can easily be run and exported to Excel, or executed
directly from the Excel interface. This allows users to combine MicroStrategy’s
sophisticated analytical capabilities with the familiar and flexible formatting
options of Microsoft Excel. Additionally, users can easily save Excel workbooks
for offline review or to preserve a historical snapshot of data.
Ad hoc reporting in Excel using familiar Excel PivotTables
End-users can easily create their own reports and analyses using Excel PivotTables
and the MicroStrategy platform. Using the simple drag and drop PivotTable®
interface, users are able to create their own reports using business terms and run
live, optimized queries against the database. End-users need no knowledge of SQL
or the physical database to create their reports. With MicroStrategy’s centralized
metadata, your users can leverage a set of common business definitions to create
their own reports that benefit from MicroStrategy’s built in analytical capabilities
and optimized querying of all major relational databases.
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MicroStrategy Office Guide