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Manage Your iSeries Data with the Power of Excel

Easy access to pertinent report data will elicit gratitude from your users.

There are many benefits to providing employees with easy access to key business data, but it's important to examine whether your procedures are making it easier to control your iSeries data access while minimizing the time spent exporting that data into useable reports.

Many solutions on the market provide effective ways to manage your company's iSeries data, but which one is right for your environment? More often than not, business intelligence (BI) and document management solutions require a lot of technical expertise and/or programming skills; therefore, implementing and maintaining the software can be an overwhelming task. But many companies are finding that they can bring key iSeries data into a program that their users already know while providing them with timely access to information.

When it comes to easy report-generation, the first solution that comes to mind for many users is Excel. When this ubiquitous spreadsheet and reporting application is paired with software that can easily transfer iSeries data into spreadsheets, users can obtain the information they need and manipulate it with the powerful tools that Excel provides for analysis, communication, and results-sharing.

This article outlines the benefits of solutions that enable the easy transfer of iSeries data into Excel and other Office applications. Hopefully, this will help you evaluate solutions that can improve your current document-handling and data-transfer procedures.

Cost Savings

Many facets of your company's reporting procedures can generate cost savings. The number one area is the streamlining of work processes. As an IT administrator, you may be creating numerous reports for employees throughout your organization: one report for your executive team, a different report for accounting, and others for administrative users. Often, these reports are created by copying and pasting data from hard-to-use file formats into Excel spreadsheets. And hours are often wasted putting reports into a format that users need to analyze the data. By using a solution that easily and rapidly exports your data into pre-designed Excel templates, you can save all of this aggravation and expense.

Increased Productivity

It is IT's responsibility to provide tools that improve employee productivity. When data is held up because users have to depend on IT to create their reports and IT is busy with other significant business tasks, problems can arise—particularly when mission-critical data is needed immediately. Having both easy access to key information and the needed tools to analyze that data are necessary to an organization's growth. When users are able to create their own reports, they have access to the information they need when they need it. And valuable IT resources become freed up.

Ease of Use

With some reporting, BI, and document-management software programs, valuable time is spent learning how to use the product and training new staff members. But who doesn't know how to use Excel? Software that can export iSeries data into Excel gives users the ability to manipulate the data in a program that they already know. Many BI software products on the market require extensive time and knowledge from the IT staff, which, again, takes IT away from critical projects.