How to Transition From Excel Reports to Business Intelligence Tools

If you are one of those people manually creating reports using Excel, you know it can be overwhelming to meet the organizational expectations for quality, insights, and velocity. The business demands of twenty-first-century data analysis using twentieth-century tools are the root of too much pain and frustration.

If you decided to do a little research on the latest and greatest alternatives, you quickly see how many tools exist to solve those challenges. Reviewing the options you think, “Hurray! This is going to be a snap. These tools make it seem so easy!” Next, you decide to take the plunge with a trial of a preferred tool like Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, Amazon QuickSight, or Google Data Studio. Don’t have a tool picked out to trial yet? You can check out business intelligence software options on G2.

However, you are quickly confronted with the realization that transitioning your company reporting from Excel is more complicated than anticipated. You ask yourself “Wait, how exactly do I get from all these mystery meat Excel reports to the data analytics promise land? Where do I start?”.This is where the self-serve nature of most tools leaves you wanting.

You need a methodology and a process. We have a few tips that will help you find success with your new tool as you transition from Excel to a new analytics model.

First, let’s recognize that your Excel reports are a good thing. Yes, I said they are a good thing. Rather than view Excel reports in a negative context, look at them as the starting point to build upon. Why? The fact you have some reporting, even Excel-based, is a starting point. Excel reports have KPIs defined, calculations embedded, have a wide distribution within the company and rudimentary workflows for creating them. These are all positives.

Your current Excel reports provide a reference implementation for whatever you will create in Tableau, Power BI, or whatever the preferred tool may be. An Excel starting point provides fertile ground for working with internal stakeholders as you refine workflow, discover data sources, document calculations, and explore the desired visualization end-state using your new tool. Think of these Excel reports as an alpha or beta version.

There are a few different steps that will assist in your transition from Excel. We suggest a “component” based approach. What is that? It is an approach that borrows techniques employed by the user interface and experience design profession.

The basic premise of this approach is deconstructing your monolithic Excel reports into smaller blocks. These blocks become more manageable and represent future reporting elements. As you will see later in the post, identifying a component should be fairly straightforward once you know what to look for.

As best you can, create an inventory of your reports. The goal is to build a library of reports that you are aware of. You can also ask around to other teams or even external partners. The purpose of creating this library of working reports is to start to identify patterns and scope the work ahead.

We would suggest picking a small subset of Excel reports that have high real AND perceived value. Maybe a report that is commonly used by executives or key leaders within the company? Get them excited about the opportunity this work can deliver.

Limiting the initial scope of this phase of your work will increase the probability of you being successful.

In this step, we are going to review your selected report(s) and start to break them down into smaller components.