Excel + An Organizational Chart
Information is most powerful when combined and viewed at many levels. Data residing in many individual Excel files is all the more useful if they are visible to a larger environment, without having to create and maintain connections in every spreadsheet.
ExcelCube makes it easy to combine Excel workbooks into any number of consolidated levels.
ExcelCube assembles workbooks into an organizational chart where each point represents a single Excel workbook. The first level shows the workbooks into which the original data are input. The levels above the input level show workbooks that receive consolidated data directly from the workbooks in the levels below them.
All of the Excel workbooks in an application remain free-standing, independent workbooks.
They can be opened in Excel at any time. They do not know that they are part of a consolidation, or even an application.
What could be easier than assigning files to a visual tree structure?
How Consolidation with ExcelCube Works
ExcelCube uses a tree structure to organize Excel workbooks into different levels of consolidation. The organization is similar to that of the Windows Explorer structure that defines folders to hold collections of files and other folders.
An ExcelCube structure defines folders to hold files and other folders...but the files are exclusively Excel workbooks. And the folders themselves each represent an Excel workbook.
Consolidated data and results from the workbooks beneath the folders in a structure are placed into each folder-level workbook.
Once the structure is assembled, it may be changed by dragging and dropping workbook files and folders. It couldn’t be much easier.
The folder-level workbooks are created and re-created every time the structure is calculated.
Each spreadsheet in each workbook is merged in its entirety with its corresponding spreadsheet in all the other workbooks. Each consolidated folder workbook holds all the data of all the workbooks below it.
In addition to the organizational structure, ExcelCube incorporates a separate workbook containing definitions of the different types of cells found in the workbooks to be consolidated. With this unique approach the data, formulas, titles, and exception logic in the spreadsheets are identified and made available to ExcelCube without any hooks across files.
Once this protocol is set up any number of workbooks can be added up and reported without any extra effort.
This also allows ExcelCube to treat multiplications and divisions properly, so that real consolidation occurs, as opposed to simple aggregation.
All Excel Files are Free Standing
All of the consolidation is done using the tree structure and spreadsheet cell definition, without any internal references. The consolidation architecture is external to all of the workbooks, so the workbooks – detail and consolidated - remain stand-alone Excel workbooks with nothing added to them, and nothing to maintain in the spreadsheets.
A Cube of Data and Results
The end result using the tree structure is a “cube” of information that can be “sliced and diced” to provide the “sweet spot” – that critical piece of knowledge that reveals the key to productivity and profits.