Feb14Written by:Chris Howell
2/14/2010 8:50 AM 
Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool you can use to create and format both simple and complex spreadsheets. Google's Spreadsheet, Open Office Spreadsheet and MS Excel are very similar. If you know how to work with one product, an expert Excel consultant will be able to easily switch to other products. For this discussion, we'll focus on MS Excel.
With MS Excel, you can analyze and share information in myriad ways to make more informed decisions, such as for business, scientific, engineering, sports or home use. MS Excel's ehanced user interface provides rich data visualization, PivotTable views and incredibly professional-looking charts that remain incredibly easy to create and use. One doesn't have to be an expert MS Excel consultant to slice, dice and present complex data in an easily understandable fashion. Most of what you can do in MS Excel is also possible in Google Docs.
Today, with the latest versions, MS Excel can be combined with Excel Services, a relatively new technology that comes with SharePoint Server and provides significant improvements for sharing data with greater security. You can share sensitive business information more broadly with enhanced security with your coworkers, customers, and business partners. By sharing a spreadsheet using Excel and Excel Services, you can navigate, sort, filter, input parameters, and interact with PivotTable views directly on the Web browser. Another great tool that may satisfy these business requirements is Google Docs. Google Docs are free, but we digress.
Professional MS Excel consultants work with many types of companies to facilitate sharing spreadsheets and business information. Their services include assistance with integration with Excel Services and the new MS Excel XML Format which provides a more efficient exchange of information.
Professional MS Excel experts teach your business users how to use Excel and Excel Services to more securely share spreadsheets with others. They may also assist by creating professional-looking charts with dramatic visual effects. These tasks can be quickly performed with a bit of practice by using predefined chart layouts and chart styles, or by manually formatting each component, such as axes, titles, and other chart labels. These tasks can involve considerably more work, and but the end result is often very impressive. Your company can use stunning effects such as 3-D, soft shadowing, and anti-aliasing to help identify key data trends and create more compelling graphical summaries. Qualified Excel experts can easily train your staff members how to create and interact with complex Excel charts the same way, regardless of the application you are using, because the Excel charting engine is consistent in MS Word and MS PowerPoint.
Modern advances in technology allows businesses to dynamically render Excel spreadsheets as HTML so others can access the information within a Web browser. Because of the high degree of fidelity with the Excel client, organizational users can use Excel Services to navigate, sort, filter, input parameters, and interact with the information, all within their Web browser. On a side note, Google's spreadsheets are also very cool in that you can see other users actually making changes in your Web browsers.
Today's businesses often need to create business dashboards from spreadsheets and share this information within a portal framework. One example is to track the key performance indicators of an airline business using browser-based dashboards that can be created from Excel spreadsheets, Excel Web Access, and Office SharePoint Server. IT consultants provide guidance on integrating this technology into current business environments.
These IT consulting companies can help your orgnaization convert your spreadsheets to XML Paper Specification (XPS) or Portable Document Format (PDF) formats to create a fixed version of your file for easier sharing with team members in a collaborative environment. Compared with older versions of MS Excel, the newer Excel XML Format enables a more efficient exchange of information among stakeholders. On problem with past XML files was the high overhead of the XML tags and "Microsoft XML fluff." In our opinion, Microsoft had never performed well in this space, but now, one can reduce the file sizes of spreadsheets and improve their interoperability with other data sources by using the new Excel XML Format.
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