Excel Model Makeover 3: Reducing Update Time from 3 Hours to 3 Minutes

<p>The course is presented in four parts.</p>

<p><b>First,</b> the course introduces a business case of a &ldquo;system updating&rdquo; model that unintentionally includes all the hurdles to prevent fast update from the financial system. The model takes a staff 3+ hour to update the Excel reports for just 1 round of changes from the system, and what&rsquo;s worse, system changes are twice or three times per day! So how to design the system updating model so that we can get &ldquo;instant&rdquo; updates from the system to the final presentation!</p>

<p><b>Second,</b> the course will demonstrate how the author has overhauled the old model so that it:</p>

<ul>

<li>Reduces the system updating time from 2 hours to 1 min, and</li>

<li>Reduces the presentation updating time from 1 hour to 2 minutes!</li>

</ul>

<p><b>Third, </b> the course explains 4 ways of reporting from a Financial System, but focuses on last 2 of them:</p>

<ul>

<li>Extract &ldquo;reports&rdquo; from the System</li>

<li>Extract &ldquo;data&rdquo; from the System</li>

</ul>

<p><b>Finally,</b> we demonstrate the 6 Do&#39;s and Don&rsquo;ts in building system-updating and presentation-updating models. Some of the best practices are:</p>

<ul>

<li>Do NOT extract &ldquo;individual report&rdquo; from the system, opening the can of worms of huge manual work. Rather, DO extract the complete &ldquo;data&rdquo; from the system for automated reporting</li>

<li>Do NOT copy/paste source data into the reporting file</li>

<li>Do NOT cleanse data manually before calculation</li>

<li>Do NOT manually key in entity name to generate report</li>

</ul>

<p>&nbsp;</p>

<p>Course Key Concepts: <b> Data extract, Drop-down list, Pivot table, Slicer, Paste Link.</b></p>