Many enterprises today discourage Excel VBA because of security and maintenance concerns.  However, Data Mart for Excel provides a way to convert Excel user-developed applications (including Excel, MS Access, SQL) into a security-hardened change-controlled repository while still completely based on Excel ribbons and menus.  As an enterprise-class data discovery tool,  it can be used by anyone in the organization who may have a need for an easy-to-use reporting tool and self-service Business Intelligence.  The reporting tool can access enterprise data using Excel menus only and without programming assistance.

From a simplistic view, Data Mart for Excel is a downloader/uploader of database records using ODBC SQL.  However because of the convenient way it provides filters, prompts and unlimited SQL cascading – it becomes a powerful data discovery tool for the enterprise.  As a reporting tool completely based in Excel, it provides unique advantages over server-centric reporting tools.

Data Mart for Excel can be operated completely and inexpensively by Excel end-users.  This includes using D4E reports, developing/maintaining D4E report definitions, creating D4E quick cubes, and creating Excel ribbon menus to navigate report applications.

By using industry standard ODBC, D4E users and report developers can access complete databases and warehouses without going outside Excel.

Users who will benefit greatly from Data Mart for Excel can be accountants, business analysts, data analysts, testers, business users, sales managers, database administrators, report writers and general knowledge workers.

By accessing directly from Excel, there are no web logons, no “export to Excel”, no intermediate steps.  Using Excel only, high-fidelity customised reports can be generated every month for top management from Oracle eBusiness Suite, SAP Netweaver BW or other General Ledgers.

Datamart4Excel is a specialist form of Business Intelligence as it does not actually require the traditional BI components of Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) or even Data Warehouse, assuming the existence of ERPs and application databases.  Instead, it assumes that the ERP or application database is the primary source of truth and simply provides a data mart facility to directly access the ERP.  For Finance and Accounting, this specialist form is also known as Accounting Intelligence. Below are some user types that can benefit from Data Mart for Excel services.

  • Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002) Auditors

Does your company have UDA’s (user developed applications) scattered all over the place that it’s a nightmare just to change a server name.

Store all your UDA’s (including SQL, ODBC connections and credentials) in one secured, central repository for easy maintenance and SOX compliance.

Prove that you have financial and risk control over all your finance processes to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 (Section 404).

Convert UDA’s into Data Marts in seconds and access them as user-friendly menus in the Excel ribbon.  Parameters can be entered and complicated UDA’s simply become one-click actions.  Have confidence that the extract process is using the same secured data mart each time, and not some unstable error-prone UDA.

In your yearly attestations for Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002, report the existence of only one system (D4E) instead of hundreds. All future extract processes incorporated in data marts do not need to be controlled and documented separately.  Extract and analyse your Financials data securely from Oracle eBusiness Suite, SAP Netweaver BW or other General Ledgers – without risk of losing financial control.

Datamart4Excel is the tool you have been looking for because it provides business intelligence and enterprise reporting capability all within Excel.  Datamart4Excel exists in menu options and toolbars but is not embedded in spreadsheets.  Datamart4Excel creates spreadsheets with financial data extracted from databases.  It does not use external formulas that can become missing values (‘#NAME?’) inside cells.  Consequently, the spreadsheet can have the highest-fidelity formatting of Financials that only Excel can provide.

  • Accountants

Does your accountant work so closely with Financials that he can see the wires coming out of the Financials database server?

Empower your accountants further by providing reporting access to bare-metal Financials data from the comfort of MS Excel.

Create Data Marts that understand your Financials and access them directly from Excel – no web logons, no “export to Excel”, no intermediate steps.  Using Excel only, automatically generate and publish hundreds if not thousands of high-fidelity customised reports every month for top management.

Immediately report and analyse Financials data securely from Oracle eBusiness Suite, SAP Netweaver BW or other General Ledgers.  With Data Marts linked directly to GL tables, your accountants do not have to wait for OLAP/BI refresh after posting a journal.  With Data Marts executed within Excel and delivering data right into spreadsheets, your dashboards can be refreshed with real-time production data without leaving Excel.

Datamart4Excel is the tool you have been looking for because it provides business intelligence and enterprise reporting capability all within Excel.  Datamart4Excel exists in menu options and toolbars but is not embedded in spreadsheets.  Datamart4Excel creates spreadsheets with financial data extracted from databases.  It does not use external formulas that can become missing values (‘#NAME?’) inside cells.  Consequently, the spreadsheet can have the highest-fidelity formatting of Financials that only Excel can provide.  It can be refreshed, signed-off, sent to managers or submitted to the Board as is.  Because there are no external formulas, other accountants/managers (with no Datamart4Excel) can receive, open, analyse, annotate, and then send back the spreadsheet for instant reuse within Datamart4Excel.

  • IT Analysts

As a Business Analyst, Data Analyst or Test Analyst, wouldn’t you like to have an easy-to-use tool to view your application data without constantly writing SQLs or asking others to do it for you?
Empower yourself by having access to all application data from the comfort of MS Office Excel and sharing this tool with the rest of the agile project team.

Without programming effort, create Data Marts that understand your application schema and access information directly from Excel.  Use SQL once to create data viewers that will then take parameters instead.   Customised SQLs are automatically created on the fly and data returned as spreadsheets in real-time.

Immediately report and analyse application data securely from any database or ERP (IBM DB2, MS SQL, Oracle, or SAP).  With Data Marts linked directly to the database tables, you can analyse and compare between production and test data, new and legacy data, pre- and post-migration data, as well as between entirely different production applications.

Datamart4Excel is the tool you have been looking for because it provides business intelligence and enterprise reporting capability all within Excel.  Datamart4Excel uses Excel friendly menu options and toolbars to create simple spreadsheets. You can create Data Marts with SQL written for any database and see them all in your Excel menu and toolbars.  Because it can be deployed to all desktops with Excel, the same proven tool can cater for a wide range of reporting requirements by end-users.

  • Business Users

As a Business User do you often feel the need for one-off application reports but have always been told that such reports will take time and resources?   As an avid Excel user, do you feel that you could do the reports yourself if only the data was made available to you?
Empower yourself by having access to all application data from the comfort of MS Office Excel and free yourself from the priority list of IT projects in the pipeline.

Without programming effort, create Data Marts that understand your application and access information directly from Excel.
  Create data viewers once that will then take parameters to cater for varied requests.   Customised SQLs are automatically created on the fly and data returned as spreadsheets in real-time.

Immediately report and present application data securely from any database or ERP (IBM DB2, MS SQL, Oracle, or SAP).  With Data Marts linked directly to the database tables, you can report on any details as they are changed or become available from the production system.   Change the reports as appropriate if new data calls for it.

Datamart4Excel is the tool you have been looking for because it provides business intelligence and enterprise reporting capability all within Excel.  Datamart4Excel uses Excel friendly menu options and toolbars to create simple spreadsheets. You can create Data Marts with SQL written for any database and see them all in your Excel menu and toolbars.  Because it can be deployed to all desktops with Excel, the same proven tool can cater for a wide range of reporting requirements by end-users.

  • Database Administrators

As a Database Administrator (DBA), do you manage multiple DBMS platforms and use different versions of Enterprise Manager tools for each DBMS?  Wouldn’t you like to have an easy-to-use common tool to view/update your database tables even if they are from different platforms, architectures and locations?
Empower yourself by using a secured tool to access database tables using MS Office Excel and sharing this tool with others in the project team and even end-users.   Implement security controls using the database user id profiles and not have to worry about releasing Enterprise Manager tools to inexperienced users.

Without programming effort, create Data Marts that can use parameters to read and update data in conjunction with database owners.  Assist database owners and developers by populating critical tables using Excel instead of repeated UPDATE/INSERT commands.  Using Excel instead of SQL code, database table updates are easy to understand, audit, and document.

Immediately report and analyse application data securely from any database or ERP (IBM DB2, MS SQL, Oracle, or SAP).  With Data Marts linked directly to the database tables, you can analyse and compare between production and test data, new and legacy data, pre- and post-migration data, as well as between entirely different production applications.

Datamart4Excel is the tool you have been looking for because it provides business intelligence and enterprise reporting capability all within Excel.  Datamart4Excel uses Excel friendly menu options and toolbars to create simple spreadsheets. You can create Data Marts with SQL written for any database and see them all in your Excel menu and toolbars.  Because it can be deployed to all desktops with Excel, the same proven tool can cater for a wide range of reporting requirements by end-users.

  • Chief Financial Officers

As the head of a large Finance team, do you feel you are being bogged down by the 80/20 dilemma of “data gathering” versus “data analysis”?   Wouldn’t you like to have a tool that can compress your team’s data gathering time, allocate more resources to data analysis, and leave the rest of the pack in the performance race?

Many CFO’s today are inundated with the preponderance of Business Intelligence tools that offer to improve the analysis of financial data.  Business Intelligence and OLAP tools offer the ability to slice-and-dice large amounts of information to provide a single metric.  This helps the managers and the management accountants.  But it does not help the Financial Accountants who have to collect accurate and reconciled information before analysis.  It is this financial accounting work that needs to be compressed as it accounts for 80 percent of your time and resources.  The very latest BI tools will try to squeze the data analysis time, but without working on compressing data collection time, your 80/20 benchmark actually gets worse!

What is needed is a tool to help Financial Accountants improve the time they take to prepare accounting information.  Data Mart for Excel is the tool you have been looking for because its powerful filtering and parameter processing provides a way for the Financial Accountant to slice-and-dice information from a large database, and produce, not a single metric, but a manageable set of results tailored to the financial accounting requirements.  Without this tool, the alternative is for the Financial Accountants to depend on drill-downs with a lot of guess work – hoping that the required set of transactions and balances will appear on one of several ways to drill-down.  It can also involve a tedious amount of search using large spreadsheets, if the results are not easily managed.

Data Mart for Excel, in true data mart fashion, provides the Financial Accountant a way to create a subset of any General Ledger information, by applying powerful filters across any segment codes and other parameters.  With powerful filters, you are able to search based on a simple list of values, ranges, patterns or any combination thereof.  Because things are done entirely in Excel, you experience Excel’s familiar look-and-feel.  The powerful filters can be re-used in other searches and therefore provide the Financial Accountant a way to repeatedly massage/refine/manage the resulting data searches until the accounting data is complete, accurate and reportable.

  • Sales Managers

As a Sales Manager responsible for large clients and intermediaries, do you require the capture and upload of voluminous data for quoting and closing – such as details of client properties required to calculate price?  Wouldn’t you like to have a secure way for your intermediaries and clients to do this for you in Excel accurately and efficiently without exposing your systems and data to compromised SQL code in your templates.

Many Sales Manages today use some form of Excel upload templates to capture customer information used to calculate prices to be more flexible and competitive.   These templates must be designed to be secured and not contain SQL code that can be compromised.  Any SQL code to upload must be found only within the Excel session when inside the organization.  The Excel templates therefore contain only validation macros and helper functions that do not compromise central data.

Data Mart for Excel, in true data mart fashion, provides the Sales Manager a way to create a secure Excel uploader, by providing SQL code within addins installed only on authorised PCs.  Data templates can be utilised outside the organisation; but when submitted to the back-office, the SQL code in D4E addins can access the data templates to upload data, just as easily as if the SQL codes were embedded in the templates.