One of the Big Things at the moment is the Dashboard - a screenfull of controls (graphs, instruments or whatever, the more colourful and eye-catching the better) which provide a snapshot of the company's data at a given point in time. Now these can be very useful if they are sensibly and thoughtfully designed, but often the design is more about aesthetics than practicality, resulting in a solution which is at best useless and at worst dangerous. It is easy to get into the habit of looking at the dashboard regularly but briefly and if the pretty pictures look good then the company and life in general is good. But unless the dashboard is exceptionally well thought out they could easily be hiding no end of problems.
So the solution? Like it says in the title, an export to Excel. And I think most people actually recognise this; the one thing I have heard from users more than anything else is "can we have that in a spreadsheet please?". What people want is to be in control of their own data. Over the past ten to twenty years most people who work in offices have built up a very considerable amount of expertise in using Excel, and given a chunk of raw data can manipulate it to get exactly what they need, often very quickly and intuitively.
So the solution? Like it says in the title, an export to Excel. And I think most people actually recognise this; the one thing I have heard from users more than anything else is "can we have that in a spreadsheet please?". What people want is to be in control of their own data. Over the past ten to twenty years most people who work in offices have built up a very considerable amount of expertise in using Excel, and given a chunk of raw data can manipulate it to get exactly what they need, often very quickly and intuitively.
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