How to Analyze Data in Excel With TARGIT Data Discovery

Excel is perhaps the most well-known software for cataloging and analyzing data. From simple functions to detailed pivot tables, it helps users uncover new information and better understand various data points.  

However, Excel-based data analysis is manual and typically static, which means users must run each analysis by hand, then upload new data and recalculate their results every time a figure within their business changes. 

For this reason, many organizations store and analyze most of their data through Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software or, better yet, an automated business intelligence (BI) solution. BI software brings together data from multiple sources, like ERPs, CRMs, and third-party tools, and automatically generates reports that reflect the latest information.  

But what happens when you need to combine data from your BI solution with information in an Excel sheet, such as projected budget data or customer contact records?  

You might feel like your only choice is to export data from your BI tool, ERP software, or other data source and then upload that data into an Excel spreadsheet for manual analysis.  

In this blog post, we’ll discuss an alternative approach that allows you to integrate Excel data into your BI solution, paving the way for automatic, dynamic data analysis.  

Meet TARGIT Data Discovery

If your organization uses a dedicated BI solution like TARGIT Decision Suite, connecting multiple data sources to your BI platform is relatively easy. From there, you can combine various data points and create a comprehensive source of truth that reflects the many moving parts of your operations. Plus, your BI software continually pulls the latest information from every source system, which ensures that the data you're analyzing is always up to date.  

At TARGIT, we offer an add-on module that also allows users to conduct ad-hoc data analysis by uploading data from Excel sheets and similar files. These data can be analyzed as stand-alone data sources, or they can be combined with data extracted from your existing data warehouse to produce a coherent data model. 

With our Data Discovery module, you can consume data from a wide variety of data sources and combine them with other data – no technical knowledge of data types or query languages required. 

Rather than pulling data out of your BI solution and into a static spreadsheet that you’ll repeatedly have to update by hand, upload your Excel data into TARGIT and compare it to the most recent information from across your business.  

For example, upload an Excel sheet of your planned budget through Data Discovery to compare it to your actuals, which are automatically updated via TARGIT. The result? Each day, your TARGIT reports will refresh with the latest actuals and compare them to the fixed numbers you uploaded from Excel.  

Data Discovery can also help you enrich existing Excel sheets with data from other parts of your business or even an external source. So, if you have a list of customer addresses in Excel, you can upload that spreadsheet to TARGIT and enrich it with geographic data from a third-party source to assess things like current market share and total addressable market. 

You can also use Data Discovery to upload a spreadsheet list of email recipients for a specific report, then use TARGIT’s batch distribution feature to send reports to the specified recipients automatically. 

And, if your data needs to be modified or cleansed, you can upload raw data and use our Formats tool to ensure your Excel data is compatible with data from your ERP or other source system.  

Get Started With TARGIT Data Discovery

Data Discovery makes it easier to combine and expand on a variety of business insights, and formatting in Data Discovery is very similar to using functions in Excel to modify and optimize your data.  

Whether you’re new to the world of TARGIT or looking to enhance your existing TARGIT solution with the Data Discovery module, we invite you to get a detailed overview of this powerful tool by following along with our on-demand webinar.