Business Tip 18
How to ... Make the Best Use of Your Microsoft Office Skills

With Microsoft Windows running on more than 95% of PCs and MS Office with a 90% share of office productivity software, Microsoft products have created the software standard in the business world. Applications that take advantage of existing Microsoft software can deliver multiple benefits to customers.

Microsoft Office is, in fact, a rich development platform for application designers. By taking advantage of Microsoft functionality, applications can be built more quickly and the resulting products have a shorter learning curve for end users typically familiar with standard MS Office operations and features.

A prime example is Interactive Edge's XP3 Suite application. XP3 Suite uses both Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint in charting, manipulating and delivering data in a presentation format.

Here is how it works…

Using a selector module, users can import specific data from one of several database management systems (DBMS), such as MS Access, MSDE, SQL Server or Oracle. The specified data is delivered into an Excel Workbook and reformatted into an Excel Pivot Table as shown.

This offers two advantages. First, working in Excel, which is the most widely used spreadsheet program, is routine for most users. Second, delivering the data into an Excel Pivot table allows users to perform additional valuations or summarizations using pivot table Calculated Items and Calculated Values. Highlighting and formatting can also be accomplished via Excel's normal and conditional format routines.

Furthermore, standard Excel functions -- such as Large, Max, VLookup and many statistical routines -- can be used to further analyze the data. All of these can be utilized by inserting an additional worksheet in the workbook, linking to the data in the pivot table and employing the Excel functions.

The ability to take advantage of the Microsoft PowerPoint application is another strong feature of the Interactive Edge XP3 Suite tool. For example, delivering the Excel generated tables and charts into PowerPoint allow users to apply standard PowerPoint formats to personalize the look of an XP3 generated chart or table. Here is an example of a pie chart and a PowerPoint format routine.

Benefits of a Microsoft Office-integrated application are…

Consistency with the Industry Standard

Excel and PowerPoint are widely used and XP3 users can take advantage of the significant enhancements that both XP3 and Microsoft offer with each new release.

Faster Development

Excel and PowerPoint allow for quick creation and modifications of charts and tables. Existing functions and wizards within Excel and PowerPoint can be used to quickly reach the end result.

Higher Quality results

Using PowerPoint allows users to insert custom created slide masters, backgrounds or to align colors and fonts to company standards or personal tastes.

Reduced Learning Time

Utilizing both Excel and PowerPoint allow users to leverage their existing skills in these packages. There are no 3rd party format routines to use or external applications that must be linked to the Microsoft platform.

Rapid sharing of results

Since the end result of the XP3 Suite process is a PowerPoint presentation, the presentation can be shared with both other XP3 users and with non-Xp3 users.

The data, products and accounts depicted in this example are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual data, products or accounts is purely coincidental.