Of course, there are countless ways that you can use Excel Services, but the following is a representative list of scenarios and examples to help you better understand how you might use Excel Services.

Business intelligence dashboards An executive committee has access to several company dashboards that act as an up-to-date financial scoreboard for the company. To continuously assess company performance, the main dashboard summarizes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as sales goals, target revenues, and profit margins, on a monthly basis. Additional dashboards summarize market news to help analyze financial risk for current and new projects, and to display charts of critical financial data to help evaluate different investment portfolios.

Marketing analysis information system A marketing department in a company that sells athletic clothing and equipment maintains an information portal page that summarizes key demographic data, such as gender, age, region, income-level, and preferred leisure activity. Most employees in the marketing department can optionally open the Excel workbooks on their computer and do “what-if” analysis of all data, or print well-formatted reports. Over time, users can also easily add reports for others to share.

Professional sports players statistics A major league sports organization shares past and present statistics on all players’ performance and salaries. This data is used to make trades and to negotiate salary contracts. New reports and analyses are created, revised, and shared by owners, especially during the pre-season.

Retail store decision-making tool A retail chain summarizes critical point-of-sales data on a weekly basis and shares it with suppliers, financial analysts, and regional managers. Reports include current items below inventory, top 20 selling items by sales categories, important seasonal data, and transaction counts by each store.

Sales account management report system A sales group accesses a set of daily briefing reports that capture key data such as the top sales people, progress towards monthly sales targets, successful sales programs, and low-performing channels of distribution. Additional reports summarize sales by key variables, such as region, product line, and month, sales calls per week, and the number of closed calls. When individual sales people display these reports, they can automatically see their sales numbers because the system identifies them based on their user name.

Engineering project daily summary An engineering group develops a Web Part Page that summarizes key project schedule data such as bug counts, status of specifications, progress diagrams, feature trends and priorities, and links to key resources and contacts. The data is drawn from several external data sources, such as project databases and lists of specifications.

Proprietary financial analysis calculation model A large financial institution has researched and developed a pricing model that is private intellectual property. The results of the formula need to be shared with some investment managers, but the formula that is used to calculate the pricing model must be secure and never be publicly revealed. This pricing model is extremely complex and takes a long time to calculate. Every night, the pricing model report is calculated and created on a fast server, saved to a trusted location, and displayed on a Web Part Page, but only to those who have appropriate permission.

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