Excel Auto Report Tool

Scenario

A customer has a set of data (CRM Data from Salesforce, extracted into SQL Server) that regularly changes, and they want to take a snapshot of the data and use it for presentations at board meetings, however the metrics has not yet stabilized so there are frequent changes to the reporting requirements.

Solution

This client has excellent in-house excel skills (and a preference for playing with the data in Excel) so after demonstrating and training them on SQL Report Server, the best solution proved to be giving them an easy route to get the data from SQL Server to Excel. The tool developed allows multiple SQL statements to be executed against the database, and then the data placed in an Excel spreadsheet. Each dataset can be configured to be delivered to a specific cell on a specific worksheet.

Simple

• The client gets a consistent spreadsheet of all their data

• Data extracted by a scheduled task

   

Practical

• Customer gets the data in a form that the business analysist can use

• Excel is a fantastic tool to allow data to be played with

   

Bottom line

• Far cheaper to allow the reporting structure to develop in a flexible medium