Software Review: Products For Creating Better Excel Workbooks

Data Presentation Products offers a suite of solutions for generating Excel workbooks in a fraction of the time it usually takes while creating Excel workbooks that are better suited to viewing, printing, and analysis.
Microsoft Excel offers a variety of features and tools to create spreadsheets and workbooks, but like most software, it has limitations. That's why Excel users look to other developers to come up with innovative solutions that make creating and manipulating Excel workbooks less time-consuming and more efficient.

Data Presentation Products offers a suite of solutions for generating Excel workbooks in a fraction of the time it usually takes while creating Excel workbooks that are better suited to viewing, printing, and analysis. The five tools are called EZ-Format, EZ-Chart, EZ-Pivot, EZ-Calc, and EZ-Stat; together, they are offered in a product called Xcelerator. In essence, these products free users from the time-consuming aspects of implementing Excel's features, thereby allowing them to utilize more of Excel's powerful features in significantly less time.

EZ-Format

EZ-Format has a wide variety of features. For example, it subtotals and totals Excel lists containing no totals, column totals, or subtotals, all without every modifying the original Excel list. Similarly, the software also formats manually created Excel subtotals or replaces them subtotals created with EZ-Format. This is an incredible timesaver, as evidenced by the fact that manually-created subtotals necessitate 79 mouse clicks, while EZ-Format only requires seven mouse clicks.

EZ-Chart

Like EZ-Format, EZ-Chart has numerous timesaving features. It can, for example, create reusable EZ-Chart formats from any user-customized Excel chart. It only takes four clicks to create identical Excel charts from any data containing the EZ-Chart formats preset fields. And, except for hiding and revealing rows of data, there are no modifications to the Excel data being charted. An added bonus is that chart data and embedded charts are horizontally centered for printing.

EZ-Pivot

EZ-Pivot allows you to create PivotTables, PivotCharts, and Drills in literally seconds. Unlike Excel, you can create PivotTables from subtotaled and filtered data. Likewise, you can format PivotTables and PivotCharts, as well as customize Drill worksheets - actions you can't perform with Excel. Plus, you can convert Excel-created PivotTables to EZ-Pivot formatted PivotTables in only two mouse clicks.

EZ-Calc

EZ-Calc is the perfect solution for creating eight types of calculated fields: aging periods; reformatted dates; Excel formulas; running totals; percentages; extracted text; conditional negatives; and calendar dates to fiscal information. You can create "Current through 90+" agings in as few as three mouse clicks, and can age as of today or as of a specific date. And, because they categorize data and reduce the number of data points, aging period fields are perfect for the X-axis in PivotCharts and the column field in PivotTables.

EZ-Stat

EZ-Stat is most likely the fastest way to calculate statistics for Excel data. With only two clicks, you can create "Quick Stats" for any single data value or for all data values that include count, sum, average, minimum, maximum, standard deviation, and median. Best of all, exported Quick Stats are formatted and printer-ready. EZ-Stat also allows you to create "Full Stats" for combinations of up to for fields, say, for each unique occurrence of state, region, product line, and date. Like the other products, EZ-Stat never modifies the original Excel list data.

Data Presentation Products' suite of software takes the pain out of creating Excel workbooks - and does a better job in the process!

Excel Workbooks: Can't Live With Them - Can't Live Without Them

Those who regularly use advanced features to create Excel workbooks understand the program's limitations. But help is available!
Excel.... When it comes to spreadsheets, it's the only game in town. For basic formatting, calculations, and the rare chart or two, it has all the functionality most users need. However, those who regularly use advanced features to create Excel workbooks understand the program's limitations. The hair pulling starts when you have to repetitively perform virtually the same formatting and analysis steps on new data for the same fields and continues when you discover that there is virtually no re-usability for the work you perform in Excel. Each time, it's almost like starting from scratch.

But what if there were products that could streamline the creation of workbooks, so that what usually takes hours could be accomplished in mere minutes? Imagine a world where you could format data on an ad hoc basis or new data for the same fields on a repetitive basis in a way that would create formatted worksheets, a PivotTable, and a PivotChart utilizing more Excel formatting and analysis features than you could ever implement manually? It would be a world of sheer bliss.

After looking at all of the products on the market, there's one that stands out above all others: Xcelerator. In essence, it transforms Excel from a cumbersome necessity into a fast, powerful, easy-to-use report writer. By automating Excel's most frequently used features, it completely eliminates repetitive, mechanical, and time consuming manual formatting tasks. The best part of all is that the program never touches the original data, whether it's manually maintained Excel data, data extracted from databases, or data imported into Excel from other applications.

If you find yourself constantly formatting new data for the same fields, Xcelerator's workbook creation and formatting process is completely automatic. Because it creates templates, it literally takes less than one minute and produces new, identically formatted Excel workbooks every time.

Although Xcelerator isn't a substitute for a thorough understanding of Excel's features and capabilities, it does streamline every step of creating Excel workbooks. But it goes beyond simply making a more efficient mousetrap because it has a number of powerful features that are exclusive to Xcelerator, such as mixing multiple subtotal types at each subtotal level and dragging the field contents of non-breaking and non-totaling fields to any subtotal level.

As if that wasn't enough, the program also allows you to print out charts and tables with headers and footer, making it ready for presentation.

Although Excel workbooks have their inherent limitations, products like Xcelerator tear down those walls and keep you from tearing your hair out!