How to Turn Data Chaos into Clarity with Smart XL
- Hey, everyone. Good to have everyone here. Welcome to all of you Excel enthusiasts and spreadsheet warriors out there. What's in store today? Today we're exploring how Smart XL bridges the gap between Excel's familiarity and Power BI's robust capabilities. We're going to get ready to discover, you know, how power can meet simplicity, right, with real-time data write-back, enterprise-scale performance, bank-grade security features, and seamless Excel integration. We're also going to talk a little bit about the business impact, right? Streamline reporting workflows, advanced planning capabilities, automated forecasting, enhanced team collaboration. So whether you're an Excel vet or you're just starting your Power BI journey, you're about to witness how Smart XL can supercharge your data operations while keeping that frontend Excel-like, comfortable experience that your team knows inside and out.
From a quick agenda, everyone, I'll do a quick round of introductions. So, hello, I'm Mike Marotta. I'm the Global VP here at Acterys. I've been doing write-back and planning inside of Power BI for seven plus years. I have 13 years of experience in BI, EPM, and visual analytic platforms, and I have worked personally with 20 of the Fortune 100 and 50 plus of the Fortune 500 and bringing write-back planning capabilities into Power BI, leveraging Excels and alternate user interface, and bridging that gap that many people are looking to do. So really excited today to walk you through what I expect to be a very fun session, especially for all those Excel nerds out there and everyone kind of cutting their teeth in Power BI.
From an agenda perspective, let's talk about what Excel's allure is, right? Why are we still using Excel? What makes it the most widely used platform in the world? What are the risks of using those spreadsheets? What are reasons that we should even think about switching to Power BI? What are the benefits of Acterys's Smart XL versus the Excel that we have on our desktop? We'll spend the majority of the time today introducing you to the Smart XL Visual and about the real-world capabilities that you could have when adding this to your Power BI ecosystem. Again, we will then finish with questions and how to get in touch. All right, so if you have any questions, everyone, please feel free to throw them in the Q&A portion. At the end of our session, we will spend a good amount of time answering as many questions as we can.
Thanks for coming along on the journey and let's get started. So Excel is allure and the risk of spreadsheets, right? Why do we still use Excel? One, it's familiar, right? It's something that we've all used, even from high school or college, and then into our professional careers, but the one-size-fits-all structure doesn't align with the diverse and evolving needs that have real-world teams asking, what's next, right? So many people are using Excel. It's familiar, it's home, it's safe, but they also know they're hitting the limitations of it.
So we'll talk about some of that stuff today. Number two, it's flexible, right? It's maybe too flexible, right? When you have unstructured data, it often doesn't scale well for large organizations, right? We have different disparate systems and complex processes in there. It can get a little hairy. Most importantly, everyone, it's free, right? But limitations around manual data entry and the file type and calculation errors and data breaches, all of a sudden it doesn't really matter that much anymore because the risk around it being free isn't worth what potentially could happen to the organization, right? When someone's working in a disparate Excel spreadsheet on their tablet at a coffee shop, right, opposed to being in their company's environment. The risk of spreadsheets in Excel, number one, no audit trails, right? Leading to a lack of accountability, unauthorized edits, things that we all deal with every single day in the Excel world.
Data silos. So many people, what's the most popular button in Power BI, everyone? Export to Excel. You do all this hard work, this amazing work to bring data into Power BI to make it pixel perfect, to organize and clean it. And what are end users doing? Exporting to Excel, creating a data silo, doing their own stuff on the side, okay? Additional, inconsistency and errors, as I alluded to in the beginning of the meeting, right? We've all been there where you have a massive error that takes a problem or a number's not lining up, and then what do you need to do? You need to turn into Sherlock Holmes and go figure out what happened, who did what, and why this issue popped up.
And you also have an inability to manage large and complex datasets. We've all been pulling data into Excel before, and when it gets too much and too complex, the wheels just keep on spinning, right? And we're having coffee breaks and we're taking time to think and all those things that you're used to in Excel. Why switch to Power BI, right? A question that we hear all the time. So a few reasons that are important that I would like to call out to the audience. Number one, it's designed to manage and process large volumes of data efficiently.
So instead of pulling data from different locations, dumping it out, putting it in Excel, and creating Excel as a database, it allows you to have that one version of the truth, right? Making it suitable for organizations that gather data from all different types of sources. Power BI also brings real-time data streaming, automatic refreshes, and the Power BI ecosystem allowing you to ingest, clean, cleanse, and provide reporting and decision-making in near real time. It also has a wide range of interactive and advanced data visualization options. As you know, we're starting to move into the age of AI, right? So Copilot and other things that you can begin using out of a box inside of Power BI. Last but not least, simplified scaling, right? We support high data volumes and complex operations without compromising speed or flexibility.
So if we look at Smart XL versus Excel, what are we actually talking about, right? One of the biggest things that I want to get across to everybody if you are interested in this solution is structured flexibility, right? Structured flexibility is one of my favorite ways to describe what Smart XL's value prop is. It provides the frontend flexibility that all of our data contributors and end users and report consumers love, but removes all of the pitfalls of Excel. We have role-level security, comprehensive audit trails, version control, structured data storage, right? All without compromising that user experience and the comfort that finance and operational professionals cherish. You can literally migrate Excel reports into smart business applications in the matter of minutes. During today's presentation, I'm going to show you how we can build something in Excel, import it to Power BI, publish it, and make it available for both reporting and for data entry across our line of business.
You can also create integrated financial and operational reports using existing knowledge that your team has. So many teams drag their feet when moving to Power BI because they're scared of a three-lettered monster called DAX. With Smart XL, you can bridge that gap. You can use Excel formulas, you can use basic logic to create feature-rich reporting and not have to rely on DAX for every single numerical value or calculation that you use in your reports.
Enhanced collaboration, real-time data updates, right? Everyone in sync. If I'm Mike Marotta, I can now come in and update a sales forecast for Northeast and my manager across the globe will be able to see that update in real time, right? All with role-level security and permissions, allowing for faster data-driven decisions around pricing, around optimization, around different types of tax rates, and different incentives that you would like to offer your internal employees. Last but not least, consolidate siloed data into a unified Power BI framework. We mitigate risk, we improve efficiency, and we allow people to take the next steps in digital transformation without breaking the bank. Simplified scaling, as I've already alluded to, we have immense data volumes and complex operations.
One of the largest CPG organizations in the world just went through with our solution. Millions upon millions and millions of rows, with hundreds and hundreds of columns in the write-back table, and that thing was zipping along. Those are things that you cannot do inside of Excel.
So I want to go back a little bit and have a little fun, right? When I thought about, "Hey, how do we position these two things together?" I went back to the "Street Fighter" arcade days, right, to the "Mortal Kombats." And let's play a little hypothetical here of choose your fighter, Excel or Smart XL. So what we'll start out with is flexibility, right? As I alluded to everyone, Excel is so flexible, that's why everyone loves it. It has great features for data manipulation and analysis, but the question becomes, is it too flexible where we start to tip the scales, right, and start to have different ad hoc things and data repositories and silos and things like that that we do not want.
Where with Smart XL, we're providing that structure flexibility. We're combining Excel, Power BI, and all of that amazing data governance, right, for advanced analytics and reporting from a data model perspective, right, and data itself and our sole version of the truth. Limited to a local workbook. Smart XL accessible across the organization. Unstructured or Excel is a database, where Smart XL is going to be structured, secure, and stored in a SQL DB.
Import only connections right into your Excel templates, where we're dumping data into Excel or exporting to, where Power BI has a variety of ways to import data, both from an import mode or direct query with a live collection, with a live connection. Planning engine. This is the biggest, one of the biggest things that I want to call out.
If you guys are aware, right? What does Excel do after 1 million rows? Starts to huff and puff and get angry at you. With Smart XL, Power BI, and Acterys, you have unlimited power. What happens sometimes when you want to do mass inputs and updates? Sometimes Excel can take a coffee break, right? Where Smart XL and Acterys can be lightning fast and instant.
Pivot tables, standard Excel formulas, where our planning engine has robust capabilities to not only create data models, but manage those, handle data hub activities, where we can ingest data on a certainly time basis, all within our planning engine, which makes us very unique in this space. Last but not least, and what I think to be one of the most important reasons that people are using Smart XL is around the governance, right? Lack of audit trail. We have audit trails out of the box, basic workbook protections in Excel. We have enterprise-level security using Microsoft Entra, right? Permissions, role-based, whatever you want to do.
You have a ton of increased errors and compliance issues, where with Smart XL and Acterys and Power BI, you have version control, workflows, approvals, all these things that you've been looking for while using Excel. Guess what? Good news, guys, even though I asked you to choose a fighter, you don't have to. With Acterys, you can do both.
So we have an Excel add-in, right, that gives you the flexibility and all the comforts of Excel, and we also have our write-back engine and our Smart XL Visual that will allow you to remove those pitfalls. So with that being said, what I want to do is jump gears and dive into the product. So with this solution here, what I would like to do, okay, is introduce all of you to our Smart XL product. So inside of the solution here, what you will see on your screen is that we are inside of Power BI. For those of you that are familiar with Acterys or familiar with the value prop that we offer, we are a suite of custom visuals directly within Power BI. Instead of using a matrix or a table or a bar chart or a line chart, you have the ability to use Acterys custom visuals.
Now with Smart XL, this really is a game changer. For the first time ever, you have the ability to create and provide Excel-based user interface to end users, both from a reporting perspective as well as a data entry perspective. Many applications you have to go cell by cell, right, or make individual changes. With this solution, your end users are going to have drag and drop functionality, okay? They are going to have the ability to come in here and add commentary and use Excel formulas and do everything under the sun. So here's the first example. This is a read-only example that was designed in Excel, or can be designed directly here inside of this interface, where I can now come in and have highly stylized financial reports with graphs, charts, and everything being hooked up to Power BI and the Power BI filters.
Any slicers, anything I want will attach and pass through to our Smart XL Visual. You can also have filters directly inside of the report, if that's what you would like to do. To showcase a change in input methodology for you all, I would like to move through this solution. To the next page and the next tab, we have sales and our cost of goods sold planning. As you can see here, things in green and things that are not yellow are calculated.
Things that are in yellow allow end users to come in and make changes. So if I want to come in here and make a change, you guys can see that my totals just updated in real time pre-save event. End users now can come in and make bulk assumptions.
They can make changes, they can revert changes, all before committing this back to the Acterys data model and refreshing Power BI instantaneously. Again, full Excel ribbon, where I can do undos and do different types of things that I would like to do inside of my platform. I can do typical drag and drop experience, right, that people are looking for. I can do increase of gross margin percentages, numerical values just by dictating what type of input I want directly inside of the Acterys Smart XL ribbon. To showcase this a little better, I want to take you over to something that's showing over a 12-month view. With this 12-month view, right, I can now come in here and make adjustments.
Now, as I mentioned, Smart XL changes the game because we are now able to use client-facing visuals and client-facing formulas. So that means DAX server-side, right? DAX is a server-side. I have to write something back, reprocess DAX. I have to create something that will calculate DAX.
With this product inside of Smart XL, end users can now come in and make an adjustment, hit Enter, and you guys see all of my graphs and everything update in real time pre-save event. That's because these visuals are part of Smart XL. These calculations were created in Smart XL.
So you don't even have to write DAX for calculated columns and fields anymore, either from a reporting perspective or to enable write-back and planning. Some other really cool things that you can do here inside of the solution as an example, is I can make something contingent on another cell. So if I want to come here and say give me D8 times 0.3, I want that to always be 30% of that row.
I can drag that formula across. And now if at any given moment I pull in new data or I need to make an adjustment to my property tax, you guys can see that the row underneath it is changing automatically. Coolest part about this type of thing, you can save this as a personalized view.
So all of your individual users will have their own permission-based experience, they'll come in and see their slice of the pie, and be able to, you got it, save the formulas or how they want to view their data. And it's personalized to them. It changes nothing in the backend, right? But allows them to have their own personalized experience as they may be accustomed to inside of Excel. Now, again, just for edification purposes, you can create all new information here. You can add sparklines, you can add conditional formatting.
To showcase what I mean by that, I would like to introduce you to the Excel Smart XL ribbon. No longer will you have to and be required to open up your Power BI pane. Now you will be able to do a lot of your report creation, all of your formatting, and how you want to interact with data directly from a familiar Excel-based ribbon. In this example, you can see I have the ability to change fonts, change background colors, to dictate where commentary is taking place. Or to tell you where I want numbers from an alignment perspective.
I can wrap text, I can merge and center. These are all basic things, everyone, but if you've ever tried to do these in Power BI, they can become complex pretty fast, right? I can then determine what type of inputs I want, right? And what type of numerical values I want, what my numbers are, et cetera. Do I want percentage? Do I want to remove a circle? I mean, a decimal point. Now, I get into really cool stuff. Conditional formatting. How many of us have tried to do this in Power BI, right? It become very painful and you may need to ask somebody for help.
With this solution, we are putting the ability to do this work in a self-service end user experience. I can now create cell rules, I can add gradient-filled data bars. I can have color scales and icons that show up when a certain number does something, and I can set that all up myself using a basic Excel-based rule-menuing system, right? And this goes a long way for user adoption, for customization, and for self-service experience directly within Power BI. Now you have the ability to format tables, you have the ability to have different types of cell styles. As an example, let me come here to this cell. I can actually say, "I want this to be a slider."
You see how this added something? I can now slide this to a certain value, okay? This could be percentages. Think of percent completes on a project. The project managers come in, they can now come in and give you a percent complete. Or, of course, right, they have the ability to simply just write in their percentage.
That is how easy it is now to build a write-back-enabled application with multiple inputs and methodologies on the same exact screen, okay? You also have the ability to lock everything down. I know people are saying, "Mike, this is just, is this the new wild wild west opposed to Excel?" The answers are resounding no. Because we have workflows and approvals, because we have audit logs, because we have a permission based experience, right? In addition, you can also lock down anything that anyone is able to do in any application that you publish. You can lock down their ability to insert rows and columns. You can, you know, take them and not give them the ability to use formulas.
You can lock this thing down and make the input screens look and feel any way you want. As an example, right, you can see here, I want to collect not just numerical information, but I want commentary information that's written back to a database. I want a workflow and approval checkbox that's inside of the actual table itself. This is the art of the possible when it comes to Smart XL. In a few minutes, I'm going to show you exactly how to do this, right? But right now, I want to show you guys what you can do at the end of the product, and when you publish this, and what the end user experience is.
Additionally, you have the ability to insert a variety charts. Our customers have come to us and said, "Mike, there's even more charts available here than there was inside of Power BI." And the cool part is these are all real time with any data inside of Smart XL.
So create to your heart's content. Add sparklines, add images, okay? Look at all these sparklines for any finance folks out in the audience today. Wouldn't it be nice if we can add sparklines? Every financial report loves a nice sparkline or some sort of indicative trend over time to visually aid what I'm looking at on a financial report.
We have a variety and a plethora of different things. You want to see something funny? You guys can also add images. How about if a variance goes too high, you see a picture of my face bright red? Not an exaggeration. If you wanted to, you can do that using this functionality. Formulas.
Everything that you can do inside of Excel, you can do here. So you can import existing templates. More on that in a bit. You can also create new mathematical logic, statistical algorithms, whatever you would like to do using the Formula tab. One of my favorite features to show people and like their mouths and their jaws like kind of drop and hit the ground is around data validation.
For any of us that have attempted to do write-back or even use like a Power Apps, right, or other applications, data validation becomes the bane of one's existence, right? You have to create different types of logic in the backend to fire something that went wrong, right? There's a lot of manual effort that goes into setting it up. With this Data Validation option, an end user or a developer or a designer of the application can actually create their own data validation logic. Now this becomes important because for the first time ever, I can click a few buttons and create a full end-to-end workflow and data validation from beginning to end. So here, you have the ability to come in, make changes, okay? I don't want something to go above a certain number. I don't want this number value to go up over 100% of last year.
You can create your own custom input message, okay? Humans, how many errors from software have you guys seen that just looks like syntax, right? Or just like a random error code. How about instead of doing that, we replace it with human insights, or something that sounds like it came from a human being. And the cool part is you can dictate what you want the alerts to do. Do you want it to stop the write-back function? Do you want to provide a warning, right, that they can override? And just so you know, this is 75% over last year's total, are you sure you want to do that? I can say, "Yes." Guess what? Just went into the audit table. Mike Marotta said yes and knew and saw the alert and is now answerable to why they overwrote it, okay? And you can do all different types of things of how you would like that to be shown.
Do you want that to be an icon? Do you want that to be a dog ear? Do you want that to be circled or have a popup? All these things you can select directly here inside of the solution itself. Grouping, ungrouping. Things that are just a little bit painful when it comes to doing things in Power BI all now become out of the box functionality. All right, I have a question. How many people have heard from their customers or their internal users, "Can I freeze panes," right? "Can I freeze my row or my column and things like that?" With this product, it's now capable. Like you've always had to have a workaround or then answer, but now you can freeze panes and unfreeze panes, which for finance and operational reporting and structured reporting goes a long way and is something that everyone looks for.
Small little thing, but again, people will feel the impact of that. You can remove, you know, all the different grid lines. You can make this look like an app, if you would like. And again, you have the ability to save what your report looks like, okay? You can manage the dimensions of the model itself and you can commit things back to the database. Another example that I would like to show you guys, just to show you again the next step and more art of the possible.
Here's one of our customers that is using us for a demand planning application. Now this was all Excel-based for them initially, okay? And now they have been able to set this up with a complete data model on the backend, structured SQL database, and a really nice simplistic and feature-rich experience through Smart XL. If you can see here, everybody, blue are editable. Everything else is a calculated field being driven off DAX or using an Excel formula.
One of my favorite parts about this input screen is the conditional formatting being used. If something goes above a certain percentage, we're going to flash red, yellow, green, okay? As an example here, let me show you and remind you of the write-back capabilities, right? So if I want to increase my demand from 200K to 500K, okay, I can now come in here, all right, do that, press Enter. And you'll see that all of my items have updated and immediately went from green and healthy, to alert, alert, you need to adjust to supply. And that lets me know that because of my 5 million unit increase, what a great month for that company, right? From 71,000 to 5 million.
But to have the ability now to manipulate and play around with supply and move from supply from one warehouse to another to be able to accommodate this, right? So this is just another example of how you can use the solution. You can filter, group, sort, anything you want. You can also lock all of this stuff down, everyone. We have so many customers that are using this now to create simplistic forms, right? I'm talking the most basic stuff, but have it write-back enabled and be able to create it in 20 minutes.
That is a differentiator for this solution in this application. In this example, team, you can see a form that was created, where we have the ability to come in here and update information. First name, last name, emails. I can choose what department I'm a part of via dropdown, right? So you can have dropdowns and sliders and check boxes, and I can commit this. The cool part is I can make this look like a PDF, and any of the forms and any of the fields that are in there, I can now write-back to an individual SQL table or an individual SQL field.
You can create this form in your Excel desktop, import it, drag on your fields from SQL to these fields, and have a full-blown application in the matter of minutes. This is another reason that people are looking to Smart XL, okay, for a structured flexible experience for their end users. So that's the quick and dirty overview of the Smart XL Visual from an end result perspective. What I think would be really helpful for the audience is to see something go end to end and then introduce you to some of our new features that are coming out with our newest release in the coming weeks.
So with that being said, let me open up Excel. So, Mike, this looks great. How do I actually start with something, right? Like I know that Acterys can do all these things, but like how do I start, where do I go, right? What am I doing? So in that example, what I really want to be able to do, okay, is introduce you all to the Acterys Excel Online add-in. This is available in the Microsoft store. Of course, you will need to be licensed to be able to use it. But in this solution, you have the ability to connect to your data models, to pull data in, connect to the Acterys data model, to your data warehouse.
You can commit things back, you can view audit logs, you can undo, you can do modeling activities, and you can even create new planning. You can do bulk updates, right? Huge need for many customers. I want to be able to take this, copy and paste it or import in excel file or CSV file and bulk update back to my database. All things you can do here.
For today's purposes and to bring something into Smart XL, let's start using our powerful planning engine, all right? Again, massive differentiator for us versus other people in this space is this modeling capabilities, okay? You have the ability to manage and model and build any type of reporting that you would like, any type of input screen, and have this connected to your backend data warehouse or database without having to be a SQL guru and learning how to do that. So in this example, I want to populate. And as you can see everybody, we have some settings here. You have a finance cube, sales cube, things like that. And I want to come in here. And in my rows, right, I want to say, "Hey, I'd like to look at my account group," okay? So I'm going to bring on my dimension of my account group.
And inside of this solution, I will now be able to make, I don't really want to see all of this stuff, right? i want to see cost of sales, expense, and I'd like to see revenue. Also, do I want to reposition these? No problem. Drag and drop experience.
I have revenue on top of cost of sales and top of expense right now. I would also like to maybe drill down to see my detail, right? So let me drag on my account name underneath it, and that will show me all of my details underneath that. Columns, what do I want to look at it by, right? Let's think. I would like to, of course, incorporate some sort of date, right? So I want to be able to come in here and say, let's give me my calendar, let's say year and month, okay? And I want to also look at my scenario, right? I don't want to look at all of my scenarios because we're doing all different types of what-if scenarios and different types of working versions. Let me do actual reverse budget. Great.
Now I'm set with my rows and columns. What do I want to be able to filter this on? I want to be able to filter this by organization, okay? And I want to be able to filter this based on calendar year. So I'm going to go back to my date and be able to drag on my calendar year. Now, remember, everyone, because you have all your elements over here, you can dictate what you want to include and what you want to exclude from anything you do here.
Now that I've made my selections, let me create my grid. Just like that, everyone, we have built a connected report directly within Excel, all right? So now, again, everyone, presentation layer, none of this data lives here. This is all coming from our backend. If you can see, I have my revenue cost of sales and expenses that I've selected, I can expand that and load that with information as well.
So now you can see all my different accounts underneath my revenue. I have the ability, if I would like to, to come in and insert new rows and calculations using basic Excel-based functionality. So if I want a gross margin, I can say this equals this plus this, right? I can now drag that all the way across and populate my entire report with this information, okay? Come back if I want to add something else, like EBT. I can come here and say give me this plus this. Same thing, I now have the ability to drive this all the way across. And as you can imagine, this is now going to be a living, breathing report, okay? With real time data pulls and connections to our data warehouse, and also have the ability that if I want to, to come in and manipulate information as well.
So as an example, if I want to change my revenue figures, I can come here and make this 2.5 million, okay? And as you can see, my calculations have updated. I can commit that to the database, okay? Press Save changes. We are now committing that to the database, and in one second, we have written back to our SQL table and refreshed Excel and Power BI, just looking at this data.
I have the ability to see my audit log, to see who did what when, okay? Another very powerful experience to be able to see those changes, all right, to see the information, and to make adjustments if necessary. One big thing for our finance users out there at the webinar today, how about the ability to build something asymmetrical? That can be hard for many different organizations and many products, especially if you're looking at companies that are working only in Power BI. With our solution, you have the ability to create any type of asymmetrical report you want. As an example, just because I'm feeling a little bit frisky, I may be able to come in here and say, "Hey, you know what? Show me the first 3/4 in this column. Show me the first three months in this column." And just like that, everyone, as you can see, I've updated this first column to include multiple data points.
I don't have to create all new report, I don't have to do anything else. I can come here. And for any field inside of my report, I have the ability to quickly and in a fast manner be able to make these changes and filter my reports and do a variety of different things.
Now, I can also come here. And of course, everyone, you have all of your finalized stylized reporting that you can do inside of Power BI and Excel. So with Excel, I can come here and say, "Hey, you know, give me my, double my bottom, you know, my double underline."
I can also say, "Hey, I want the ability to, you know, let's insert a sparkline here," right? I talked about sparklines earlier. So here I can say, "Give me a sparkline for this entire cell, all the way across," okay? I come here, hit Enter. And now I have a sparkline, okay, at the end of my report.
And again, we can expand this and you can drag all this stuff down any way you would like, and this will come through into your report. We also have the ability, of course, to add charts and graphs and anything else that you would like to do that will respond in real time with the solution itself. So here, let me insert a recommended chart and I will take this column chart real fast and we'll drag it down here, okay? And now that we have all of this stuff here and we're going, "Oh, this looks pretty good, I may want to publish this to Smart XL." So how do I do that? I come here, I will save my solution, okay, and my workbook.
And let's go to my desktop, and let's call this Smart XL webinar. Press Save changes. Just like that, I can now switch back to my Smart XL interface, come to my clean tab here, everyone.
And as I alluded to earlier, you have the ability, and this is one of the biggest selling points for this type of solution and to understand what it can do, you have the ability to import existing Excel files. So whether your team is already using Excel and it's disparate and using it for planning, you can actually import their exact template here, hook up fields to your backend data model for realtime reporting, and make fields write-back-enabled using the Acterys planning engine. Same exact, if not enhanced, experience for your end users, but you're having all of the structure and governance that you guys have been yearning for when only using Excel. In this example, let's come here, I'll import my Excel file, okay? And let's go to my Smart XL Webinar. It's in use, so let me close that.
And now we're going to open it. And in the matter of a second, everyone, you can see that I now have my report here directly within Power BI and hooked up to my data warehouse and my data model. That's pretty impressive functionality.
And just how quickly and easily you can build input screens, financial reports of any complexity, add charts and graphs. And again, as you can see, everyone, you have the variety and the ability. I can see my sparklines, all right? And again, remember, everyone, all write-back-enabled as well, right? So I can come in here and make adjustments, all right, make inputs, et cetera. And that's a really nice powerful experience that you can now provide out, publish this to the service, and all of your end users come in and have their own individualized experience.
Some new features that I wanted to call out for you, right? So let's go to a new tab real fast. Some really powerful things that, you know, I wanted to make sure you're aware of. The Acterys Wizard is now available, okay, directly within the Smart XL application. What this allows you to do is to create, okay, complex formulaic language without having to learn how to write it, all right? So you can come in here and determine do I want to write-back value to be able to be editable, right? Do I want to have something come from this amount of years? You can pick your tables, your rows, your identifiers, and this will allow you to create formulaic languages without having to do any training. This Acterys Wizard has been a game changer for people that we have in pilot mode with this, because now they can start with the report, import from Excel, and create complex planning logic right here for both a reporting and a write-back perspective that will be working and in line with everything you have going on in your data warehouse directly out of the gate. In addition, one of my favorite parts that I wanted to make sure we show you guys is that when I'm here, you guys see this new Power BI table functionality? Many people ask, "Hey, Mike, you know, you have data coming from a database.
What if I want to pull data from my data model?" Well, now you can do that. So again, if I want to come in and drag in my group or my name, I can pull that in, if you see Power BI fields, and I can assign that to an individual cell, meaning I can say populate this drop down with all of my accounts. I can say, "Show me in this row all of my account names," right? "I want to roll things up to my subgroup." And the beautiful part is it's all drag and drop experience that you can now bring these in and begin having that hybrid-based approach on your Smart XL screen of data coming from a database, something being calculated by an Excel formula, and also having real-time information coming from DAX or your Power BI model itself, okay? Very powerful new features. Wanted to make sure everyone sees those.
But you can now manage your entire data model, you can add and create all the different formulaic languages that you need using the Acterys Wizard, and you have the ability to use the existing Power BI data model that you may have and be able to pull that into Smart XL to sync up real-time reporting and the ability to enter data. So with that being said, I'm going to shift gears again. I hope you guys enjoyed everything that we just reviewed there. I want to do a quick recap, okay? And then open up for some Q&A, all right? So with everything I've shown you guys so far, okay? Let me skip ahead here. Of course, PowerPoint being, well, frisky.
Let's see here. So as we dive into this, right, I want to make sure you guys realize that this isn't just vaporware, right? This is affecting our customers' lives. So in this organization, Urban Energy, right, they were able to show a 90% decrease in errors throughout their reporting and budgeting and planning process.
They save three days per week in regards to project management, labor costs, and other things like that. They could focus on value-added efforts, all right? You can see here, they lacked integrated solution for real-time reporting. They had difficulty tracking projects and budgets and everything like that.
They spent hours on manual processes. Our solution of Excel and Power BI merging together allowed them to handle millions of data points in real time. It was 100% compatible with their existing workflows 'cause they were already using Power BI and already using Excel. The manual work was cut by 50%. And this is the type of thing that customers can expect when streamlining, automating, and going on that digital transformation journey with Smart XL. Last but not least, everyone, again, drive these things home for you.
With Smart XL and Acterys and Power BI, we can empower your team to take control of your data with Power BI writeback, right? Putting the power of direct data modifications in your team hands. No technical expertise required. You can maintain data integrity, right? Sleep good at night, rest assured knowing every update synchronized perfectly between Power BI and your source systems.
Not asking what version of, what version of Excel is this again, am I looking at the same template as you, right, and removing the manual reconciliation. Providing a unified solution, Acterys brings your essential business tools together. You connect Power BI Excel planning and consolidation in one powerful screen.
Last but not least, automated intelligence. Say goodbye to the complex data, you know, database, Excel's database configuration. Our intelligent planning engine will handle all of that technical complexity, allowing you to focus on what matters, making decisions in your business insights. So that's it for me. What I will do, okay, is going to, let's shift gears a little bit now and start taking some questions. So let me pull up what we have here, and I will dive into the Q&A, and we will try to answer as many questions as possible.
Okay, one question. What type of Power BI licenses are required for this? So for this solution to work, the only thing that you'll require your end users is the ability to view a shared report. So that typically falls under Premium, okay? Or a Pro license, right? So having the ability to view a shared report that's published by someone is all that you will need.
And another question for Mary, "Where is the write-back being stored?" Great question. So with Acterys, we have a SQL backend. So that's kind of a loaded question because we write-back to SQL, but the SQL database can live in a multitude of different ways. We have a full cloud offering, okay? Just for the audience to know, Acterys is SOC 2 and Type 2 compliant, which is a unicorn in the Power BI ecosystem. So we have the ability to store and house your data in a secure and encrypted fashion. That usually takes about five minutes to get set up.
We also have alternative options for installation. One of those can be a hybrid option, where the write-back engine will live in Acterys's environment, but all data lives behind your tenant wall, whether that be an Azure on-prem. And last but not least, we have on-prem options, right? So unplugging everything and putting it inside of your Azure tenant entirely, or even on-prem, right? So a lot of different options for how you can store data and where that will go.
Question from Kevin, "Apologies if this was already covered from the SQL side, this is require SaaS, S-S-A-S, if so, multidimensional only or tabular available?" So this is not requiring that. So we set up, all we need is a SQL table to be set up. Our modeling engine will create and manage the dimensions and the star schema itself. Okay, let me see here.
We have another question from Jillian, "Is this feature in preview or now generally available?" Smart XL is generally available. So we have customers using it and it's ready for you guys to use. What data sources do we write-back to? So typically, we write-back to SQL for a performance-based method, and we have a plethora of ways to write-back data in real time to other systems, right? We have a lot of companies that want to push things into the data lake, people that want to push things into Databricks and Snowflake, and, you know, there's a variety of discussions and decisions that need to be made on if that is the right thing to do. But, yeah, we have customers that use everything from Snowflake, you know, to HANA, to, you know, Adaptive, to all different types of things they want to write-back to, and Workday and things like that. So our main preference for our users is always to write-back to a SQL database. It's by far the most performant and gives end users that one-second refresh that everyone's looking for if they come from excel.
All right, and I believe that may be all of our questions. And I will pull up one more thing for everyone to see and make sure that you guys can see this stuff on the fly. I want to say thank you to everyone for joining us.
Really appreciate it. And what I wanted to pull up for you guys is how you guys can contact us, right? Do you want to demo for your team, for your environment? Do you want to talk about a way to get your hands on the product? Please feel free to contact us today. You can contact me personally at mikem@acterys.com. You also see my LinkedIn profile here. I love to connect, talk about all kinds of cool things. I'm going to write-back and planning with you guys.
I also want to let you know that because you guys joined us today, we will be sending you a link, as part of a follow up, to give you a free trial with Smart XL that you'll be able to download from the Microsoft App Stores and play around with to get familiar with the things that you saw here today. So we don't let you leave empty handed. Hope you guys enjoy playing around with Smart XL, seeing what the value prop could be for many organizations. And again, if you're interested in pricing, licensing models, or even a custom demo for a specific use case you have in mind, please don't hesitate to reach out. I hope all of you guys have an amazing Christmas, and enjoy the holidays with you and your families.
Thanks for your time today.
2024-12-27 01:24
