Taking Control of Excel

An IT team at a large Investment Bank was frustrated at its failure to deal with ‘the Excel problem’.

Traders, and others working with large amounts of data, love Excel. But it’s a problem as a business tool for a number of reasons:

• It is hard to share sheets, so you end up with multiple disordered copies of data variations;
• There is no audit trail so it’s impossible to know who has changed what and when;
• Excel’s flexibility means anyone can change anything. So it becomes hard to add the business logic and supporting validation needed within individual corporate applications.
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AdapTable offers an alternative which meets business and regulatory needs, and working with partners can deliver management of Excel itself.

The combination incorporates 2-way data binding. This means that data can be exported from a grid to Excel (including as scheduled reports), then as the grid ticks through live data updates, the AdapTable combination automatically updates Excel; likewise, as changes are made in Excel by individual users, they are returned to AdapTable. This provides a clear and consistent ‘golden source of data’, and there is a full track record of what has been changed, available through AdapTable’s sophisticated Audit Log.

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AdapTable’s advanced validation capability allows users to create business rules to check edits in Excel and to disallow them if necessary, or to alert managers. Adaptable Tools, by working with the capabilities that other data pioneers are offering on the desktop, has delivered a solution which will ‘tame’ Excel. Our integration enables users to continue with the tools they want, while allowing Compliance and IT teams to sleep at night.