Category: Best Practices

Posted on: March 4, 2011 Posted by: Johnny Comments: 2

Business Intelligence Professionals Are Like Batman

Business Intelligence Professionals Are Like superheroes because they want to keep their anonymity and they pass on their information for others to respond to. A good metaphor is Police Commissioner Gordon and Batman.

Posted on: February 16, 2011 Posted by: Johnny Comments: 2

How to Count or Sort Rows by Color

If you’ve had a spreadsheet with many rows colored and other rows left uncolored, then you realize that there is no easy button to sort or count rows that have color. This can be a very time consuming process, unless you use Visual Basic. Here’s one solution that we’ve come up with.

Posted on: January 21, 2011 Posted by: Johnny Comments: 0

The Art of Charting in Excel

As a Business Intelligence professional you need to know how to make a good chart in Excel. A good chart can “land” you the client, separate you from other vendors, or make your message to management extremely persuasive. This VIDEO shows you EXACTLY how to create good Microsoft Excel charts. Here is part 3 of a 3 part series on how to create compelling charts in Excel.

Posted on: January 13, 2011 Posted by: Johnny Comments: 12

Cut Data Reconciliations by 90%

You get a new data file and the numbers are close, but slightly different from the other file you already had. Suddenly, you’ve got two different sets of data. Now you have to spend two hours matching things up. Let’s use three steps and make this project a ten minute exercise.

Posted on: December 10, 2010 Posted by: Johnny Comments: 2

Diminishing Returns – The Business Intelligence Podcast [BIP]

I had a rare opportunity to speak with and get an e-mail from my Internet Business guru. Business term “The Law of Diminishing Returns”. And companies around the world spend up to $100 billion a year to train employees in the skills they need to improve corporate performance… But training typically doesn’t have much impact.” Find out why this happens?

Posted on: December 1, 2010 Posted by: Johnny Comments: 0

How to Create an Excel Chart that Amazes

A good chart can “land” you the client, separate you from other vendors, or make your message to management extremely persuasive. This VIDEO shows you EXACTLY how to create good Microsoft Excel charts. Here is part 2 of a 3 part series on how to create compelling charts in Excel.

Posted on: November 20, 2010 Posted by: Johnny Comments: 3

The best office holiday gift for your boss or coworker

The challenge was finding a gift that was not too showy, but would be remembered. Not too expensive, but display quality. After a lot of thoughtful research, I found a great gift… A pen. No, really, a very cool pen. For starters it’s historical. Pens were given by Presidents George Washington and Harry Truman and also used in Space.