Stéphane-Robert Langer

You’ve probably noticed that you shouldn’t trust this blog for real-time news tracking. The following are essentially timeless, however, so here we go…

Rob van Gelder (of DailyDoseOfExcel fame) shared a tip back in May on how to build a simple Gantt chart in Excel. I’m posting a link here because it’s the easiest I’ve seen so far.

Jeff Smith exposes his Golden Rule of data Manipulation over at sqlteam.com. While he elaborates on his statement from a programmer’s standpoint, it’s all applicable to knowledge workers and spreadsheets:

“It is always easier and more flexible to combine data elements rather than to break them apart”

From a data analysis standpoint, Jeff’s examples are essentially related to what I would call attributes (such as phone numbers). His rule still holds true with values, though. As you work towards summarizing a data set (say, daily financial transactions that you want to analyze by month), you’ll want to aggregate values as late as possible instead of running the risk of losing valuable information by aggregating too early. Spreadsheet programs hit a limit between 65k and 1M records, but there are tools to take it from there – which brings us to Paul Steynberg’s advice for considering OLAP tools as part of a financial system manager’s toolbox.

OLAP technologies are particularly well suited to handling large amounts of data. I personally share Paul’s opinion of Microsoft’s SQL Server Analysis Services, which I would describe to the non-initiated as Excel on steroids. On lots of steroids, that is. SSAS gives you access to summaries and advanced computations based on millions of underlying records, usually responding in just a few seconds.

EDIT (Sep. 10, 2008): Using a definition as crude as “Excel on steroids” for SSAS left me feeling a little guilty. I’m over it now, having just read Andrew Fryer’s post on business intelligence for small business;-)

I can’t seem to find the original Hugh McLeod quote Andrew Fryer is referring to, but here is how it goes anyway:

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is actually about business, it just sounds like a science project.

This potential confusion is one more hint that this field (multidimensional modeling and analysis but really Business Intelligence in general) requires both technical skills and business acumen. Probably just another argument in favor of Business Intelligence Competency Centers…

Still on the OLAP front, a new (beta) version of Palo is available. Wikipedia has a short summary:

Palo is a memory resident multidimensional (OLAP or MOLAP) database server [...] typically used as a Business Intelligence tool for Controlling and Budgeting purposes with Microsoft Excel as a user interface. Beyond the multidimensional data concept, Palo enables multiple users to share one centralised data storage (“Single version of the truth“).

There’s a (somewhat old) discussion thread here. I only played 10 minutes with it – it seems to offer many interesting features. You can also apparently connect Palo and Microsoft Analysis Services using software from Cubeware.