Business Intelligence Reporting Services [BIRS]

Confounded new tool, Whippersnappers, and why the new Excel is great!

Change is hard.  Real change is really hard.  You don’t hear that said very often.  Realizing this truth helps you understand why people you know have a hard time changing.  We’ve written before about how we should tier our users and part of the reasoning for this is that the vast majority of people don’t want things to change.  When you get right down to it, people spend over half of their energy just trying to keep things the same.

Now there is “the new” Excel.

When this tool came to a local client’s office, we were amazed at how many people didn’t want to upgrade.  The Finance department “unionized” and said they wouldn’t upgrade until all the bugs were taken care of.  A few Business Intelligence professionals were considering it, and the majority of the sales department still didn’t know what Excel was.

We took a more systematic approach.  We had one laptop with the old version and the desktop computer upgraded with the new tool.  This way we could see the differences, and still use the old one if there was a problem.  There was not a problem, just a learning curve.  After we transitioned to the new tool we found 2 or 3 things that we loved about the changes, and when people ask, we demonstrate them.  Here are our favorite new features:

1.       The “Remove Duplicates” button.  This is located on the “Data” Ribbon to the right side of the ribbon.  It will take the data you highlight and remove any duplicated values leaving you a unique set of records.  Super handy for getting a clean customer or parts list.

2.       The “Cell Styles” button.  This one allows you to format cells with one click.  After you’ve generated a great set of information and you want to highlight the totals or spruce up the headers, this button makes it shockingly easy.  The button is located on the “Home” Ribbon and once you click it, it shows 50 different options for formatting.

3.       This isn’t very simple to find, but there’s a “Rosetta Stone” for moving from 2003.  If you use this link, the new format shows up.  Find your favorite function and then the web page will show you where to get to it in the new version.   Click here.

We’ve found that the new tool benefits outweigh the problems with Pivot Tables or file extensions.

Do you have a favorite feature in that “confounded new tool?”   Share with the other whippersnappers in the community via the comments.

Photo Credit: kio