ExcelCube offers a system of working with spreadsheet numbers that represents a dramatic savings in the effort required to add or report data across Microsoft Excel workbooks.
Taking advantage of ExcelCube can mean looking at a given task a bit differently.
How Things Are Done Now
Excel is used mostly for numbers. Databases are used mostly for textual information or textual information with numbers.
Each offers a strength. Excel presents data in an easily understood matrix of rows, columns and calculations, and the database provides organization for many entities and is scalable.
In cases where there is large amount of data held in Excel files, an interface is set up to load a database to combine data and report results, often back out to Excel workbooks.
With Excel
Smaller applications in Excel have several entities represented on a single spreadsheet and rows from these are summed together, or several spreadsheets are used and linking formulas are written to add data onto another spreadsheet.
When more than one workbook is used, linking formulas are used to bring data across files. Where the workbooks use different formats, these formulas map a row from one workbook to different row in another workbook.
Applications using more than a few workbooks require a real effort in writing and maintaining these linking formulas.
With a Database
A database is made up of individual records containing fields. The fields are defined when the database is originally set up and they have to accommodate any possible occurrence of information that will be available.
Each record holds all of the fields, whether they are used or not, and each record is identical to every other record. This property of uniformity in the records makes the database easily scalable, without a practical limit. And this is why a request for data summed across entities can be made without requiring any kind of links.
Enter ExcelCube
If some of the characteristics of the database layout are adapted to the Excel workbook, the workbook can become part of an integrated Excel system, retaining the simplicity of Excel and gaining the scalability and organization of a database and without the need for any linking formulas to add or report across workbooks.
Bring in ExcelCube and the effort required to work with large amounts of data in Excel is reduced by an order of magnitude or two, and the data can remain in Excel without having to learn a new environment.
Excel then becomes a very much more productive tool.
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