Excel Business Solutions

Need Excel Consulting And Data Mining Services?



Are you faced with any of these challenges?

  • The need to create an Excel macro to do a major task?
  • A repetitious job in Excel that takes hours or days to do manually?
  • Being asked to create an Excel macro to solve a major need?
  • The need to convert raw data into useful Excel format?
  • The need to create an Excel macro for use by many people in your company?
  • A tight deadline?


Our services include but are not limited to:
  • Database Programming
  • Report Automation | Reporting
  • Data Manipulation and Conversion
  • Database Marketing
  • Data Audit
  • Excel VBA Programming
  • Data Cleansing
  • Data Mining and Forecasting
  • Data Integration
  • Financial Modeling
  • Query Calculator and Tools
  • Customized Excel Functions
  • Spreadsheet and Database Design

If you are, we can help you! We can:

  • Perform with quality tasks ranging from the simple to the difficult.
  • Suggest improvements and enhancements.
  • Do so for small and large jobs.
  • Do so at a reasonable cost.
  • Deliver the macro quickly and on time.

Read More



Take the next step and contact us. It takes only a few minutes:

  1. Use our contact form to contact us about our Excel consulting and data services.
  2. Give us a short description of your need.
  3. We'll contact you within hours in most cases.

Testimonials


"Excel Business Solutions provides reliable and professional support when it comes to developing tools for project managers in our company. The fact that Anthony and his team manage to provide solutions for complex tasks make him an invaluable IT expert. I highly recommend Excel Business Solutions!"
  - Batoor Khan, ATB Austria - "Excel Business Solutions has risen to all the challenges I have posed to them, tailoring solutions to our unique requirements making EXCEL more functional to our analysts."
  - Dr Stephen St.George-Smith, PICR, United Kingdom - "Anthony and his team were able to create very powerful yet easy to use pivot tables that have helped in developing our business analytics."
  - Joe C., Stone Oak Underwriters, LLC. USA. - "Excel Business Solutions saved me TIME, money and frustration. Smart people surround themselves with competent people."
  - Jim H. , Whitman County Assessor"s Office. USA - "Thanks to Anthony for his expert Excel skills and amazing turnaround time. I"ve come to call him my "IT Genius" and have given him multiple projects that consistently yielded outstanding results. Finding him through an Internet search was like finding gold in a haystack. Thanks again."
  - Lee., Altschuler Law. USA - "One of our high-tech Fortune 100 clients handed us a very complicated report and asked us to make it more user-friendly. Excel Business Solutions provided an elegant solution to a very challenging assignment. They surpassed our expectations and our client was blown away!"
  - Sparky Witte, Kolar Advertising & Marketing. USA -

How can Excel programming work
for you?

Since 1993, Excel has included Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a programming language based on Visual Basic which adds the ability to automate tasks in Excel and to provide user defined functions (UDF) for use in worksheets. VBA is a powerful addition to Excel. Excel macros are programs that store a series of commands that you can "play back" the actions. They can reduce the number of steps required to complete tasks and significantly reduce the time users spend creating, formatting, modifying, and printing their spreadsheets. A macro can be as simple as replicating some formatting tasks or as complex as querying information from various data sources through database programming.

Example: A financial analyst downloads financial tables from the Internet each day for analyses and report generating. She covers 30 stocks for the computer industry. Each day, she picks up the numbers from the tables, performs some financial ratio analyses, and enters the ratios into different reports. She has to do these repetitive tasks for each of the 30 companies that she covers. These tasks take up most of her time in the office. With the help of a consulting service, she is now able to have all of the reports completed in minutes, giving her more time to write her reports and to relax.

How important is data quality?


Data Quality refers to the quality of data. Data are of high quality "if they are fit for their intended uses in operations, decision making and planning" (J.M. Juran). Alternatively, the data are deemed of high quality if they correctly represent the real-world construct to which they refer. One industry study estimated the total cost to the US economy of data quality problems at over US$600 billion per annum (Eckerson, 2002). In fact, the problem is such a concern that companies are beginning to set up a data governance team whose sole role in the corporation is to be responsible for data quality. Although most companies tend to focus their quality efforts on name and address information, data quality is recognized as an important property of all types of data.

Data quality process may include some or all of the following:
Data profiling - initially assessing the data to understand its quality challenges. Data standardization - a business rules engine that ensures that data conforms to quality rules. Matching or Linking - a way to compare data so that similar but slightly different records can be aligned. Matching may use "fuzzy logic" to find duplicates in the data. It often recognizes that "Bob", "Bobby", "Rob" and 'Robert' may be the same individual. Monitoring - keeping track of data quality over time and reporting variations in the quality of data.

Does data mining really help?


Data mining uncovers patterns in data using predictive techniques. These patterns play a critical role in decision making. Using data mining, companies and organizations can increase the profitability of their businesses by uncovering opportunities and detecting potential risks. Forecasting is a component of data mining. It is the process of estimation in unknown situations. Prediction is a similar but more general term, and usually refers to estimation of time series, cross-sectional or longitudinal data. Forecasting is commonly used in discussion of time-series data.

Example: One Midwest grocery chain used data mining method to analyze local buying patterns. They discovered that when men bought diapers on Thursdays and Saturdays, they also tended to buy beer. Further analysis showed that these shoppers typically did their weekly grocery shopping on Saturdays. On Thursdays, however, they only bought a few items. The retailer concluded that they purchased the beer to have it available for the upcoming weekend. The grocery chain could use this newly discovered information in various ways to increase revenue. For example, they could move the beer display closer to the diaper display. And, they could make sure beer and diapers were sold at full price on Thursdays.

Why Database Marketing?


Database marketing emphasizes the use of statistical techniques and data analyses to develop models of customer behavior, which are then used to select customers for communications. The benefit of database marketing is the ability to target your marketing efforts. Companies can concentrate their marketing effort on customers that are most likely to buy.

Example: An Internet marketing company is sponsoring a trade show in Houston. Instead of sending invitations to thousands of their customers around the United States, the company runs a query in its marketing database and extracts a list of customers located in the Houston metro area. The company then sends out its invitation package to this targeted list.


Quick Contact Box

Reference

MS Excel and VBA
Close [x]

Microsoft Excel and VBA

Excel is a powerful spreadsheet allows you to store, manipulate, analyze, and visualize data. It features an intuitive interface and capable calculation and graphing tools which, has made Excel one of the most popular microcomputer applications to date. It is overwhelmingly the dominant spreadsheet application available for these platforms and has been so since version 5 in 1993 and its bundling as part of Microsoft Office.

Excel has included Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a programming language based on Visual Basic which adds the ability to automate tasks in Excel and to provide user defined functions (UDF) for use in worksheets. VBA is a powerful addition to the application which, in later versions, includes a fully featured integrated development environment (IDE). Macro recording can produce VBA code replicating user actions, thus allowing simple automation of regular tasks. VBA allows the creation of forms and in-worksheet controls to communicate with the user. The language supports use (but not creation) of ActiveX (COM) DLL's; later versions add support for class modules allowing the use of basic object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques
More Info
Database Marketing
Close [x]

Database Marketing

Database marketing is a form of direct marketing using databases of customers or potential customers to generate personalized communications in order to promote a product or service for marketing purposes. The method of communication can be any addressable medium, as in direct marketing.

The distinction between direct and database marketing stems primarily from the attention paid to the analysis of data. Database marketing emphasizes the use of statistical techniques to develop models of customer behavior, which are then used to select customers for communications. As a consequence, database marketers also tend to be heavy users of data warehouses, because having a greater amount of data about customers increases the likelihood that a more accurate model can be built.
More Info
Forecasting Analysis
Close [x]

Forecasting Analysis

Forecasting is the process of estimation in unknown situations. Prediction is a similar, but more general term, and usually refers to estimation of time series, cross-sectional or longitudinal data. Forecasting is commonly used in discussion of time-series data.

Time series methods use historical data as the basis for estimating future outcomes.

  • Moving average
  • Exponential smoothing
  • Extrapolation
  • Linear prediction
  • Trend estimation
  • Growth curve

Some forecasting methods use the assumption that it is possible to identify the underlying factors that might influence the variable that is being forecasted. For example, sales of umbrellas might be associated with weather conditions. If the causes are understood, projections of the influencing variables can be made and used in the forecast.

  • Regression analysis using linear regression or non-linear regression
  • Autoregressive moving average (ARMA)
  • Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) e.g. Box-Jenkins Econometrics


In statistics, regression analysis is the process used to estimate the parameter values of a function, in which the function predicts the value of a response variable in terms of the values of other variables. There are many methods developed to fit functions and these methods typically depend on the type of function being used.

An autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model is a generalization of an autoregressive moving average or (ARMA) model. These models are fitted to time series data either to better understand the data or to predict future points in the series. The model is generally referred to as an ARIMA(p,d,q) model where p, d, and q are integers greater than or equal to zero and refer to the order of the autoregressive, integrated, and moving average parts of the model respectively.
More Info
Data Mining
Close [x]

Data Mining

Data mining is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns. It is usually used by businesses and other organizations, but is increasingly used in the sciences to extract information from the enormous data sets generated by modern experimentation.

Although data mining is a relatively new term, the technology is not. Companies for a long time have used powerful computers to sift through volumes of data such as supermarket scanner data, and produce market research reports. Continuous innovations in computer processing power, disk storage, and statistical software are dramatically increasing the accuracy and usefulness of analysis.

Data mining identifies trends within data that go beyond simple analysis. Through the use of sophisticated algorithms, users have the ability to identify key attributes of business processes and target opportunities.

The term data mining is often used to apply to the two separate processes of knowledge discovery and prediction. Knowledge discovery provides explicit information that has a readable form and can be understood by a user. Forecasting, or predictive modeling provides predictions of future events and may be transparent and readable in some approaches (e.g. rule based systems) and opaque in others such as neural networks. Moreover, some data mining systems such as neural networks are inherently geared towards prediction rather than knowledge discovery.
More Info
Data Cleansing
Close [x]

Data Cleansing

Data mining is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns. It is usually used by businesses and other organizations, but is increasingly used in the sciences to extract information from the enormous data sets generated by modern experimentation.

Although data mining is a relatively new term, the technology is not. Companies for a long time have used powerful computers to sift through volumes of data such as supermarket scanner data, and produce market research reports. Continuous innovations in computer processing power, disk storage, and statistical software are dramatically increasing the accuracy and usefulness of analysis.

Data mining identifies trends within data that go beyond simple analysis. Through the use of sophisticated algorithms, users have the ability to identify key attributes of business processes and target opportunities.

The term data mining is often used to apply to the two separate processes of knowledge discovery and prediction. Knowledge discovery provides explicit information that has a readable form and can be understood by a user. Forecasting, or predictive modeling provides predictions of future events and may be transparent and readable in some approaches (e.g. rule based systems) and opaque in others such as neural networks. Moreover, some data mining systems such as neural networks are inherently geared towards prediction rather than knowledge discovery.
More Info
Data Integration
Close [x]

Data Integration

Data integration is the process of combining data residing at different sources and providing the user with a unified view of these data. This process emerges in a variety of situations both commercial (when two similar companies need to merge their databases) and scientific (combining research results from different bioinformatics repositories). Data integration appears with increasing frequency as the volume and the need to share existing data explodes. It has been the focus of extensive theoretical work and numerous open problems remain to be solved. In management practice, data integration is frequently called Enterprise Information Integration.

More Info

* Source: wikipedia.org