From Manual To Digital: Breaking The Excel Cycle
2025
Do you spend valuable and significant time every month preparing reports on the business/organisation performance?
A UK-based charity was spending precious time every quarter developing reports manually in an Excel workflow. I helped them automate this process via the use of Microsoft’s PowerBI which allows for two key process improvements: 1) the automatic cleaning and preparing of the data and 2) the automatic generation of charts and visuals.
1. What did The Data Knitters do?
Here’s some light technical lingo: I built a data model in PowerBI which replicated all the formulas and manual changes originally made to the data in Excel. The charity was using 4 different datasets, so I also needed to join these up to get data consistently from all of them.
This data model then flowed into a report; a set of charts which could be manipulated by filters to change the date, location, type of asset, amount of asset and so on. We can’t show the final result due to a NDA.
2. What’s digital transformation got to do with it?
This is equally a data analytics, data visualisation and digital transformation project. We facilitated the use of digital technologies to fundamentally change how the organisation operates. This is a core principle of The Data Knitters: we help those we work with make better use of their data so they can be more efficient, free up precious time and make better decisions.
Get in touch!
Do you need to improve your reporting process? Get in touch on hello@thedataknitters.com. Be it Tableau, PowerBI or even custom-built reports, I’m here to help.