Spreadsheet Proliferation Solution Offered by mrc
March 20, 2007 Alex Woodie
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iSeries development tool maker mrc says it has come up with a new way to empower Excel users with the capability to display their data analysis on the Web, using Excel pivot tables, thereby alleviating some of the pain and suffering foisted onto IT administrators by end users. It’s a common occurrence to see employees pulling data from host systems (such as the iSeries) into desktop products like Excel. Despite the fact that it’s done every day, organizations still suffer from IT maladies as a result of the process, including data integration problems, security issues, and out-of-date information. While there’s no silver bullet to these problems, mrc says it has come up with a way that can at least take some of the pain out of these distributed environments. The solution to the problem is to take the data that would ordinarily be distributed via e-mail as Excel spreadsheets, and to instead put it up on the Web. Earlier this month, mrc announced it has added a new feature to its development environments that enable users to create Web reports from data pulled from any spreadsheet that uses pivot tables or similar functions to analyze data. Best of all, no Web experience is necessary to complete the process, mrc says. By putting the reports on the Web, organizations can alleviate the problem of having multiple spreadsheets in circulation that have different versions of the numbers. It also boosts security by having the reports in a centralized location, instead of residing in people’s e-mail inboxes. The new features are available in both of mrc’s development environments, including its multiplatform m-Power and its iSeries-focused mrc-Productivity Series. For more information, go to www.mrc-productivity.com
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