BIDA0016 – First AdventureWorks Dashboard – Overview

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Please watch the video in 1080p because it is recorded in High Resolution.
Please note the script of the presentation is below so you can read along with the demonstration if you like.


Hello and welcome.

My name is Mihai Neacsu and I am the business development manager here at BIDA.

Firstly I’d like to say thank you very much for coming along and watching our latest video today. I really appreciate you coming along so thank you very much for that.

This video is a very short video on how to build Excel Dashboards using Meta5.

We are just going to show you the end result because this video is intended for business users who are wondering how do I get my Excel reports better, cheaper, faster on time, at 9am in the morning, with all the information I need in them?

Without out-dated information, without macro-errors, and all the other things that go wrong with Excel reports.

That is who this video demonstration is intended for.

We are going to show you a new idea, an alternative idea, on how to get your Excel spreadsheets, better, cheaper, faster.

Ok?

So with that let me go in to the Meta5 desktop.

And here we are, in my Meta5 desktop.

I have come in to Adventure Works, Example Reports, Example Report 01.

I just want to show you something very briefly.

Sales Territories.

We are using the Adventure Works database which you will most likely be familiar with.

We click show data and there are three sales territories, Europe, North America and the Pacific, in the adventure works database. That is the database we are using.

So let us say you want to run some reports for each of those territories and distribute them out to the territory managers maybe via a one drive.

We have created an example of exactly that.

We have this capsule. And I will just open it up.

At the end of the capsule is an icon called PC directory.

I am going to press F 4 and I am going to go in to other data.

And in the options window you can see a directory name.

Now this is a development machine and it only has a C drive.

As I scroll through the directory name you can see it is the BIDA One drive.

You can see that it has a long directory path on the C drive.

You can see that the last piece of the path name is Adventure Works and at A A.

Now at A A is what we call a variable and in this case it is the region name.

So you would expect that to point to some sub directories.

So that is the name of the directory that the PC Directory icon is pointing at.

Just to prove it, we will go across to the file manager.

Here is that directory on this PC.

You can see it is being operated on by one drive.

So what we are going to do is to go in to each sub directory and we are going to delete the excel dashboards that are currently in the sub directories.

I want you to see they are being deleted.

So you can see on the screen there is nothing in the three sub directories.

Of course you could have many reports, we are just doing one report.

We will just leave the capsule and go again to sales territory.

We will click show data.

You can see Europe, North America, Pacific.

Now of course you could use anything.

You could attach other names to the outputs to point to other sub directories.

You could have individual marketing manager names in the sub directories.

You can do all those sort of things. Ok?

The idea is that what gets put into the spreadsheet is just the data that is needed for the report for the person who is the user of the spreadsheet.

It then gets put in to the one drive and sent to wherever it is that the user of that spreadsheet wishes to receive the spreadsheet.

One drive will send the spreadsheet where ever it’s rules say to send it.

What we are going to do now is click the run button and the capsule will run and generate the dashboards.

What it will do is take those three territories and send them into the controls of the capsule. And when we look in to the capsule it is going to send the territories in to at A A. The last one that was sent in was Pacific.

So it is going to send those three sales territories in to the capsule.

It is going to run the capsule three times.

It is going to create three different excel dashboards and send them to three different directories in the one drive which will then be distributed according to the one drive rules.

So we are going to click the run button, and then we will hit pause on the video, because you do not need to wait for it to run.

Ok, so now you can see complete please continue.

And we can go back in to file manager.

And we can see Europe.

Here is a report. 1, 32 pm. 10th August.

North America.

Pacific.

They take about a minute each to produce on this PC.

Now if we open up one of the dashboards.

We can see it is a simple dashboard.

We see the reseller order amount and the internet order amount figures from the adventure works database.

We presume you have seen this database before and are familiar with what is in it.

We can do things like select multiple currencies.

We can pick individual countries.

Let us select France.

Germany.

Select the UK.

Notice that this dashboard has just the data for Europe.

Now we will close this dashboard.

Let us open the dashboard for North America.

In the North America report we can see US dollars, Canadian dollars and we can see different data. We have the same report with different data.

So we can go over here to the United States and click on that.

And it responds to show us just United States data.

We can click on just bikes.

We can click on accessories.

We can click on clothing.

You have all the features of Excel.

We are using Excel 365 because it has lots of features.

Most companies we talk to will be using Excel 365 or would be willing to move to Excel 365 to get these dashboards.

Now we can go to the Pacific folder and open the dashboard for Pacific.

We need to click on AUD as well.

We can click on bikes.

We can multi-click on accessories.

You get the idea.

So we have a capsule that ran that delivered data to a one drive that then delivered the workbooks out to different places.

Now to just prove that.

We will go over to our sharepoint site in our web browser.

We will drill down the folders to where the dashboards were delivered.

Now we come in to the Europe folder and you can see the dashboard is there.

We go into North America and you can see the dashboard is there.

We go into Pacific and you can see the dashboard is there.

So you can see that the three spreadsheets arrived in to our sharepoint portal through our one drive.

So we ran a capsule with three regions, Europe, North America, Pacific.

The capsule did something to produce an Excel dashboard for each region.

Each dashboard only contains the data for the region it references.

It was then put in to the one drive and distributed by our one drive to our sharepoint folder.

That is what I wanted to show you in this short 10 minute video.

The ability to build excel dashboards using Meta5 and distribute them through the one drive network repeatedly.

And we can customise those dashboards to contain just the data that is necessary for the people who are going to view just that dashboard.

So when someone comes in to work in the morning and go to their one drive or sharepoint portal and open their reports they only have their data for their reports in their excel dashboards.

And they don’t need to be connected to any server to get their data for their reports or to drill around in the reports. The data for the report is inside the workbook.

So that is what I wanted to show you in this demonstration.

We are going to build a more detailed demonstration for your technical people to look in to so they can understand exactly what is happening inside that strange thing called a capsule.

That will be a longer and more detailed technical demonstration.

We would like you, as a business manager, to know that it is possible to have a suite of excel reports delivered in to a one drive or a company shared drive to be distributed to all the people who need it.

And inside each report is only the data that each person who reads the report needs to have in order to use that report.

And if a number of people want a collection of data obviously they can do that too.

If you need to have reports that link back to SSAS cubes of course you can still do that.

What we are talking about is the opportunity to take all those regular reports that are run day in and day out and are sent to people.

They can receive those reports with just the data they need inside those reports disconnected from any server for more data.

I hope you liked this short demonstration of a faster, better, cheaper way to build and support your Excel reports and dashboards.

If you would like to contact me? Please use our contact page.

So with that?

Thank you very much for listening and bye for now.

I really appreciate you!

Thank you!

Mihai Neacsu