ExcelWhitePaper

TAKING EXCEL TO
THE NEXT LEVEL
A practical guide for power users
RedPixie Ltd | 020 7112 2033 | 113 Shoreditch High Street, London, E1 6JN | redpixie.com

Contents
Fine-tune your spreadsheets ................................................................................................................................................... 3
Create from left to right........................................................................................................................................................ 3
Remove defunct calculations .............................................................................................................................................. 3
Cut down on workbooks and sheets ............................................................................................................................... 3
Make Excel visual .......................................................................................................................................................................... 4
Microsoft Excel Power View ................................................................................................................................................ 4
Machete ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 5
Microsoft Power BI.................................................................................................................................................................. 6
RedPixie Azure Calculation Engine (ACE)............................................................................................................................ 7
High-performance Excel ....................................................................................................................................................... 7
Taking Excel To The Next Level: A Practical Guide For Power Users Page 1 of 9

Excel. It’s essential to your business. Your everyday processes rely
on it, but your employees are telling you it’s reaching its limits.
But your employees are constantly hitting the limits of Excel’s native capabilities:
• Slow-running calculations are causing business inefficiencies and long waits for your team.
• Complex interfaces and a lack of visualisation options are making spreadsheets un-navigable and
data analysis next to impossible.
• A constant need to upload and download the latest version of a spreadsheet is killing
collaboration between your employees and slowing everyone down.
Meanwhile, your team are using this grinding tool for critical business processes. You know you can’t
afford to keep using Excel in its current state, but, moving to a new product could be equally detrimental
on the efficiency of your team.
Plus, you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Excel is actually a very powerful tool. Even if you’re up
against the limits of the system, there are few better alternatives.
Your team needs the same product, but quicker, prettier and stronger. Read these insights, and learn
how to take Excel to the next level:
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Fine-tune your spreadsheets
Let’s start off with the basics. Microsoft doesn’t advertise these three tricks, but they can improve
spreadsheet performance dramatically:
Create from left to right
Excel calculates expressions from the top-left corner or the spreadsheet to the bottom-right. While this
is intuitive, if your spreadsheets aren’t laid out to complement this computation, it can make the gears
grind.
Try to arrange your spreadsheets so that dependent cells are always to the left and below of their
sources.
Remove defunct calculations
Once you’re certain that cells in your spreadsheet no longer need to be recalculated, turn them back
into static values. Any reduction in the amount of calculations Excel needs to make will reduce the
amount of time it takes to work.
Cut down on workbooks and sheets
Workbooks and sheets allow you to organise one mammoth spreadsheet into several digestible ones,
but linking calculations across these separate panels also slows performance. One sheet good, many
sheets bad.
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Make Excel visual
Although Excel has many chart options, it’s surprisingly difficult to make visualisations that are attractive,
engaging and interactive. This makes analysis and understanding slow, inefficient and often fruitless.
Unfortunately, most of Excel’s charts and visual functions leave much to be desired.
Microsoft Excel Power View
If you use Microsoft Excel 2013, or beyond,
then you already have access to an effective
visualisation tool: Power View. It lets you
take your Excel data and turn it into
something much more presentable, creating
detailed graphs and charts. By downloading
the free Bing Maps add-on, you can even
express location-based data on a map.
See this video for a useful introduction to the
tool, and learn more about it from
Microsoft’s website.
If you’re using Microsoft Excel 2016 and can
no longer find the tool, it is still there; here’s
the solution.
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Machete
If you’re using an earlier version of Microsoft Excel, you’ll need to look elsewhere for effective
visualisation. Machete is a great option. Hosted on a website, the tool takes uploadable CSV files and
turns them into tweakable data presentations which you can view - and link people to - at any time.
While this website-hosted approach might tie you to a internet connection, it also means the
computation for the visualisation is not a burden on your PC.
Additionally, if you upload files smaller than 2MB and are storing less than 1024MB on your account,
you don’t have to pay to use the tool. Beyond that the price jumps to $29 (or around £20) per month,
but, if your employees only rarely need to visualise their Excel information in small chunks, Machete is
an attractive free option.
It’s worth noting that Machete is still in Beta, so, in the developer’s own words; ‘expect to see a bug
from time to time.’ Nonetheless, the tool is effective and creates great looking results.
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Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is a powerful
tool, allowing you to create
impressive, interactive
visualisations and share them
with your colleagues.
It’s easy to create dashboards and projects and Power BI uses natural language queries to create data
reports without you having to learn a new software language. You can also import data to create these
reports from Excel and CSV files.
You can also publish your reports to the website for free, although this feature is in pre-release and may
be chargeable in future. For now, it allows you to access all of you and your colleagues’ reports on any
device.
This tool is available for free, but for access to the advanced collaboration tools you’ll need to upgrade
at a cost of £6.20 per user per month. See here for full pricing a feature details.
By using the paid Power BI service, you’ll not only get a better understanding of your data, but you’ll
improve teamwork and collaboration.
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RedPixie Azure Calculation Engine (ACE)
The biggest limiter for Excel’s calculation process is its reliance on a single desktop. Even fast PCs won’t
be able to produce quick results in large Excel spreadsheets. That’s why Excel simply cannot be truly
improved without moving it the cloud.
High-performance Excel
By taking the program’s calculation processes and moving them to our cloud servers, our ACE engine
is a powerful solution to the crunchy problems Excel experiences when under heavy use.
The result?
• Quick. ACE can revolutionise calculation times for complex spreadsheets. In fact, our latest
deployment of the tool for a customer saw them achieve an 88 percent reduction in execution
time of a key business process – a saving measured in hours not minutes or seconds.
• Familiar. Meanwhile, you’ll still be accessing spreadsheets through Excel. There’s nothing new
to learn: we simply take the computation pressures off your desktop and into our cloud.
• Secure. Because we run ACE on Microsoft Azure’s cloud infrastructure, you have all the
benefits of scalability without worrying about the security of your business processes.
• In the background. Your team will never be out of action while their computer grinds
through a mass spreadsheet update: they simply leave ACE to do the work for them, allowing
them to keep working on any other tasks simultaneously.
• One authoritative source. Our servers continually run their spreadsheet calculations
whenever there’s an update, meaning you’ll always find that the spreadsheet you access is the
most up-to-date version.
By combining ACE with Microsoft Power BI or another visualisation tool, you can create a highperformance,
information-rich, collaborative solution to your Excel problems.
For more information about Azure Calculation Engine see: redpixie.com/solutions-partners/azurecalculation-engine
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READING
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