Excel as a BI Platform – Part 3

Below is a Part 3 of the Guest Post by my guest blogger Dr. Kadakal, (CEO of Pagos, Inc.). This article is about of how to build Dashboards and Data Visualizations with Excel. The topic is large, and the first portion of article (published on this blog 3 weeks ago) contains the the general Introduction and the Part 1 “Use of Excel as a BI Platform Today“.  The Part 2 – “Dos and Don’ts of building dashboards in Excel“ published 2 weeks ago  and Part 3 – “Publishing Excel dashboards to the Internet“ is started below and its full text is here.

As I said many times, BI is just a marketing umbrella for multiple products and technologies and Data Visualization became recently as one of the most important among those. Data Visualization (DV) so far is a very focused technology and article below shows how to publish Excel Data Visualizations and Dashboards on Web. Actually a few Vendors providing tools to publish Excel-based Dashboards on Web, including Microsoft, Google, Zoho, Pagos and 4+ other vendors:

• www.securesheet.com


• www.spreadsheetconverter.com


• www.jedox.com


• www.bonavistasystems.com


• plus of course Microsoft, Google, Zoho and Pagos (SpreadsheetWEB)

I leave to the reader to decide if other vendors can compete in business of publishing Excel-based Dashbaords on Web, but the author of the artcile below provides a very good 3 criterias of how to select the vendor, tool and technology for it (and when I used it myself it left me only with 2 choices - the same as described in article).

Author: Ugur Kadakal, Ph.D., CEO and founder of Pagos, Inc. 

Publishing of Excel Dashboards on the Internet

Introduction

In previous article (see "Excel as BI Platform" here) I discussed Excel’s use as a Business Intelligence platform and why it is exceedingly popular software among business users. In 2nd article ("Dos&Don’ts of Building Successful Dashboards in Excel") I talked about some of the principles to follow when building a dashboard or a report in Excel. Together this is a discussion of why Excel is the most powerful self-service BI platform.

However, one of the most important facets of any BI platform is web enablement and collaboration. It is important for business users to be able to create their own dashboards but it is equally important for them to be able to distribute those dashboards securely over the web. In this article, I will discuss two technologies that enable business users to publish and distribute their Excel based dashboards over the web.

Selection Criteria

The following criteria were selected in order to compare the products:

1. Ability to convert a workbook with most Excel-supported features into a web based application with little to no programming.


2. Dashboard management, security and access control capabilities that can be handled by business users.


3. On-premise, server-based deployment options.

Criteria #3 eliminates online spreadsheet products such as Google Docs or Zoho. As much as I support cloud based technologies, in order for a BI product to be successful it should have on-premise deployment options. Without on-premise you neglect the possibility of integration with other data sources within an organization.

There are other web based Excel conversion products on the market but none of them meet the criteria of supporting most Excel features relevant to BI; therefore, they were not included in this article about how to publish Excel Dashboard on Web .