Excel, Excel plus Palo and beyond Excel

An estimated 500 Million people worldwide use Microsoft Excel. Out of these 500 Million users about 5%-10% perform some kind of analysis, reporting or planning tasks with Excel. While Excel is very flexible and highly accepted in all organisations and enterprises, people will – as soon as the company has more than a few employees – very soon end up in something commonly referred to as spreadsheet hell.

With this in mind, I recently posted an article about the Beauty of Palo. Palo’s beauty lies in the introduction of centralized data cells and in a more than 2-dimensional (i.e. multidimensional) writeback-enabled database which is centrally hosted on a secure server within the organisation. With Palo, many users can simultaneously work with consistent data in Excel. Data entries in one sheet (or even data imported from CRM and ERP systems) will automatically be applied to all worksheets in the organisation. Therefore, “Excel plus Palo” is a better solution than Excel alone. “Excel plus Palo” provides all advantages of a centralized Business Intelligence solution without the cost and the time it usually takes to introduce a dedicated Business Intelligence solution.

Now, what do I mean by “beyond Excel”? While “Excel plus Palo” is already a great advance in terms of data integrity and process efficiency, could there be even more? The answer is yes. For example one important feature that is missing in todays spreadsheets is “structure dynamics”. When you change a value or filter criteria in a spreadsheet, all dependent cells are updated automatically . This is “data dynamics”. The data is recalculated, but the row and column structure of the spreadsheet remains untouched. But with structure dynamics the spreadsheet would not only adjust the data but also the row and column structure necessary to display the data (for example an ABC Analysis may require 5 or 10 or 100 rows to display all A products depending on the query parameters).

While traditional spreadsheets are structure static, the new online spreadsheet available with the upcoming Palo BI Suite will be structure dynamic by introducing a new technology called “Dynaranges”. While in design mode, Dynaranges are displayed as a rectangle, covering a range of cells within the spreadsheet. These cells are actually linked to a data query (for now restricted to Palo queries, but MS Analysis Server and other data sources to follow within the next few months).

At run time the Dynaranges unfold (horizontally and/or vertically) and create as many rows and columns as the underlying data (metadata like dimensions or attribute table) require. When the underlying data or the query parameter change, the Dynaranges will automatically adjust the row and column layout of the resulting view.

Dynaranges are only one example of the advanced spreadsheet technology that we built into the Palo BI Suite. Other examples are server based scrolling, dynamic report repositories or the new chart types that we are adding to the product. I will talk more about these on a future post.