How is Big Data Transforming Managed Infrastructure Services?

Traditional IT environments are not capable of meeting the challenges posed by big data, including – legal, ethical & regulatory, pertaining to security, cost, availability and the most important i.e. of inadequacy of IT infrastructure and database systems. Also, big data far exceeds in quantity that traditional units of storage management (LUNs, volumes, aggregates, etc.) can manage.

Furthermore, it is sourced from ‘n’ number of sources in a variety of formats and so organizations, across all industries, have to manage data that is captured at more detailed levels along with keeping historic information.

Overall, Big Data management is a challenging job. And so the new age IT environment needs to be quick, efficient and robust to store, manage and analyze big data. What organizations really need at this point of time are managed infrastructure services, especially designed to overcome, if not all, at least some of the aforementioned challenges.

1.    Agile & Robust Infrastructure
The amount of data supporting mission-critical applications continues to multiply from gigabytes to petabytes and even more. So to manage data centers, network and desktop support operations and deliver the business value and better responding to changes and conditions that affect the business, an agile & robust architecture needs to be built prioritizing data storage and management.

2.    Technical Expertise
Focus should be on all the key stages of data infrastructure, including – Deployment and configuration, Monitoring, Diagnostics and Reporting & multitude of technology areas: Installation and Configuration of Hadoop clusters, Application Migration on Hadoop and disaster recovery.

3.    Integration & Scalability
“Big” data infrastructures certainly needs to be able to scale and integrate easily to support big data platforms and applications. To allow big data storage systems to expand file counts into the billions without suffering the overhead problems that traditional file systems encounter, object-based storage systems need to be adopted. This should also scale up geographically, enabling large infrastructures to be spread across multiple locations.

4.    Security
To tackle new security considerations that may surface when big data analytic cross-reference data that may not have co-mingled in the past.

5.    Accessibility
To allow multiple users on multiple hosts to access files from many different back-end storage systems in multiple locations, it is recommended that storage infrastructures are used as these include global file systems that help address this issue.
Some of the infrastructural approaches for storing, processing and analyzing big data, include:

Hadoop
Hadoop is an ecosystem of different products and its key components include: HDFS, YARN, Map Reduce, Spark. It is both cost- and time-effective because it’s open source, free and can run off cheap commodity hardware. Additionally, it processes multiple ‘parts’ of the data set concurrently, making it a comparatively effective tool for in-depth analysis.

NoSQL
NoSQL databases are adept at processing dynamic, semi-structured data with low latency, making them better tailored to a Big Data environment.

Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Technology
MPP technology process humongous data in parallel, for instance, hundreds of different parts of the same programme.

Cloud
Cloud solutions have minimal up-front costs and deliver faster insights.

Google offers Cloud computing products such as BigQuery, specifically designed for the processing and management of Big Data. Similarly, Amazon Web Services has a wide range, included EMR for Hadoop, RDS for MySQL and DynamoDB for NoSQL.

Competitive Advantage

Managed Infrastructure Service solutions provides a road map to take your infrastructure from basic to a dynamic and utility based one. It helps turn your enterprise into a truly adaptive enterprise. However, the key is to understand the impact that these technology designs can have on your analytic needs and determine an appropriate approach. Following are the top competitive advantages:

•    Improved user accountability, excellent business transparency, controlled IT resource consumption, and better regulatory compliance.
•    Enhanced productivity through rapidly provisioned, shared services
•    Reduced IT overheads

An Introduction: Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a framework that presents everyone with endless possibilities for learning to build web applications, quickly and easily. It is a useful tool for anyone, including – startups, code newbies and any other individual wanting to build a website and is facing difficulty using PHP & Java. It has following 3 modules:

1.  Model Holds the data for your web application. For example, if you had a list of names and address it would be kept in the model.

2.  View Displays the data. It is what the user sees, usually in the form of HTML templates.

3.  Controller This fetches the data from the model and sends it to the view and vice-versa. The controller allows the user to edit, delete and read the data.

Furthermore, Ruby comes pre-loaded with Gems – pieces of pre-packaged code which help to speed up development and give you functionality during your development. The code that’s provided is written by a skilled professional and so you don’t have to attempt to write the code yourself. You may think of Gems like a WordPress plugin for a WordPress site. With Ruby on Rails, you do not have to spend time configuring files in order to run them.

It uses the Ruby programming language and covers both the front-end and the back-end so you can actually build a cool web application without having to rely on someone else to build these functionalities. Built on DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) philosophy, Ruby on Rails emphasizes that code is not repeated over and over again so that information can be found in a single and clear location within your application. It is a big plus especially when you need to collaborate with another developer.

Technology and programming evolves and changes quickly. Keeping pace and predicting the future trends is not just difficult, it’s close to impossible. Having said that, one of the biggest benefits “Ruby on Rails” have to offer is a real website that you can share with friends and others for it takes only a few days to come into being. It is one of those rare web application frameworks that will allow you to make quicker progress from the very beginning.

It is astounding to see how quickly it helps you to implement your ideas and the things you want to do. Both professionally and commercially, Ruby on Rails is a path breaking concept that has become extremely popular with startups because real-world web applications can be created quickly and easily.

In future, of course, nobody can predict how this programming framework will change but for now it is likeable and has a great community, so it’s going strong.

Some tips to best learn Ruby on Rails

#1 Read “The Well Grounded Rubyist” by David Black. It will help you learn Ruby language.

#2 Read the book Meta programming Ruby by Paolo Perrotta. It will help you understand meta programming.

#3 go through interactive tutorials on Code academy.

#4 try free Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl, once you’re acquainted with Ruby.

#5 for details and queries, check out #RubyOnRails IRC channel on free node.

#6 Read Rails Guides to understand how different parts of Rails work in detail.

#7 for screen casts and learning web development in general, you may use Rails casts.

To gain more knowledge, check out the Rails source. Remember it’s huge and complex. Also, it keeps changing rapidly. To start reading and contributing to source, begin with railties/lib/rails/all.rband railties/lib/rails/commands.rb. To follow how boots rails, read the initialization guide and railties/bin/rails.

Ruby on Rails: Quick Facts

# Ruby on Rails is not a programming language – It’s a framework for building websites that combines the following programming languages – Ruby, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

# Who developed Ruby on Rails – David Heine Meier Hansson (DHH), a Danish programmer in 2003 # Technically, it implements Model-View-Controller, or MVC – MVC splits up the process of getting information and presenting it to the user.

# Get Started with Ruby on Rails – Install it using tools called installers. Most popular one is called Rails Installer, or you can go to rubyonrails.org to gather the information and files required to install Ruby on Rails on your computer.

Top 5 Benefits of Mobile-First CRM

CRM or customer relationship management software is a powerful technology that has been constantly used by sales teams of businesses across many industry verticals for past 20+ years.

Traditionally, CRM databases were used on desktop computers. And though it still serves many important functions such as tracking customer relationships, set follow-up reminders and mapping of the sales pipeline – it remains stuck inside the office. It evolved as computing power increased with SaaS computing and became a powerful, software system rich with features. It is now capable of optimizing the sales funnel and giving valuable analytical statistics to the management and decision-makers.

However, despite its value, the sales rep could not retrieve any important information stored inside the desktop CRM. The kind of convenience they were looking for was unavailable to them as soon as they entered the field. The scenario has changed over time and market now has several mobile-first CRM solutions, such as ForceManager, which are providing much needed flexibility and autonomy. Mobile CRM, designed for mobile devices, gives access to customer data through a mobile app or a web-based browser with cloud CRM.

CRM: Some Quick Facts

1.   Gartner reports indicate that by 2017 the customer relationship management market will be globally worth $36.4B.

2.   For every $1 spent, CRM offers an average return of $5.60.

3.   Sales reps saw productivity increased by 15% when they had mobile access to CRM applications.

Here are the Top 5 Benefits of using a mobile CRM:

1.   Increase in Sales & It’s Completed Quicker First and foremost, a mobile CRM will increase sales. While they’re in the field, your sales rep will have instant access to account history, product information, pricing and promotional materials that in turn will help them close more deals and increase the overall deal value. As all of the necessary information will be available on their phones, they will not have to waste time looking up for contact info to remember the last conversation with a prospect. This shall remove the clutter helping them to create genuine relationships and ultimately closing more deals.

2.   Increased ROI on CRM as Data Collection Increases Manifolds Another key benefit of using mobile CRM is to allow your sales force to access real time data while out in the fields meeting prospects and customers. The mobile CRM makes it faster to collect valuable information, delivers insight into what is happening in the field and how to best allocate resources. By allowing sales reps to use the CRM in the field to update contacts, input notes, request information or submit a proposal, management will always have access to the latest customer data, thus increasing the return on the CRM investment.

3.   Enhanced Productivity Mobile CRM by utilizing core technologies on smartphones, tablets and all handheld/mobile devices gives instant info about an upcoming meeting, contact information and recent notes for the prospect without having to navigate separate applications or search at any other place. Thus, it boosts and maximizes the productivity of sales representatives. Having mobile CRM can be an enormous time-saver and helps in organizing and viewing your weekly agenda in a map-layout, optimize planning and make more client touches than otherwise possible.

4.   BYOD-Friendly A mobile CRM works impeccably across all devices and platforms, including wearable and syncs information across all such platforms. So adopting mobile-CRM for your company allow your sales team to use the mobile/handheld device they prefer most in the field. Additionally, it helps to keep pace or outpace competition in the marketplace and shun use of outdated mobile devices.

5.   Helps Provide Best Customer Service Earning customer loyalty isn’t easy. The objective is to acquire lifetime customers and so it’s critical that sales and customer service are aligned. Having access to the same updated information is imperative when it comes to finding, communicating and responding to queries, complaints and potential problems facing your current and future clients. Mobile CRM certainly makes it incredibly fast.

Conclusion

In 2015, having a mobile CRM will no longer be an option. This valuable technology shall be making your business more connected, your sales team more effective and management more efficient in allocating resources.  All that in turn will yield higher revenue because with mobile CRM – your sales teams won’t be wasting time in the office with data entry when they could be out closing more deals.

How to Check a Cloud Vendor’s Technical Security Measures Are Adequate?

Just as a building requires proper physical security measures in place, such as doors made of sturdy materials and having appropriate types of locks; for technical infrastructure – a vendor needs to deploy extremely well secured technical security measures that are built in, configured, or implemented appropriately. You may actually think of cloud vendor’s technical infrastructure, comprising of – servers, network, platform, databases, and applications, equivalent to a building.

If the vendor deploys secure configuration guidance to secure the commonly used infrastructure component, proactive updating of products to patch security holes and other vulnerabilities as they are identified is a must. However, if the vendor, for differentiating itself from the competitors, uses less common components, check that the vendor’s staff has the technical security expertise to ensure that a secure configuration was developed.

To ensure the security of the infrastructure, evaluating the testing and approval of changes is also important. So once infrastructure is 100% secured, vendors need to ensure that changes to its components and configuration don’t open up other security loopholes.

For that purpose, policies and procedures the vendor has in place to manage changes should be evaluated, including the need for a required change to the extent that actual programming or configuration change is determined and check if the change is tested before it is moved into the production environment to ensure that it doesn’t impact operations or security.

And if programming is involved, the best practice is that programmers don’t have direct access to the production environment — this ensures that they can’t sneak in any changes without proper testing and authorization.

Alternatively, you may do the following:

• Avail cloud services from major vendors as these are mostly secure. You may check the published descriptions of their management processes and technical measures.
• Use Cloud Security Alliance, a framework that encourages vendors to adopt publishing security information
• Ask your vendor for a Service Organization Controls (SOC) report covering security and privacy.

Role of ERP in Improving Retail Business Processes

As it is around for a long time now, most people know that Enterprise resource planning (ERP) has the potential to improve business processes. But are they aware that there exists something like retail-specific ERP? Just like other ERP systems, it collects and use data to automate processes but is designed in a much more specific way for use in the retail industry. Take a look at some of its advantages to see how it can improve retail-specific business processes.

Advantages of Using a Retail ERP Suite

Retail ERP suite has retail specific components and is customizable to meet the specific requirements of a retail organization in an effective and efficient manner. It is so designed that it has provisions to meet the varying needs of the different segments that vary in their nature and scope of operations, within the retail sector. Besides, it offers support for the store systems that execute the critical functions including – keeping track of the inventory, ordering and renewal, loss prevention and task management and form the fulcrum of a retail business. All this and more makes retail ERP system suited to the specific needs of a retail organization.

Other Advantages:

Easy Configuration, Scalability and Usage

A modern retail ERP system grows with the organization and allows a high degree of scalability to attune itself to the size of the organization and its level and scope of operations. Such configuration and scalability proves to be a boon in managing the retail operations across an enterprise besides providing support for phased implementation. If phased implementation (step-by-step & incremental) occurs, it makes the transition to an ERP system a lot easier allowing even the users to acclimatize, for whom it might initially have been complicated to use.

Support for Advanced Functionalities

There are “n” decision making processes in retail business that the modern retail ERP systems lend support to by supporting advanced functionalities. This not only helps in formulation of business strategies to introduce efficiencies in the critical business processes but also lets the top management set the benchmarks and achieve the desired results.

The ERP systems support advanced functionalities such as inventory optimization, pricing schemes, stock planning, and store execution.

Integration & Automation Support

Technology and application integration provides the enterprise-wide view to the management by allowing a seamless transfer of processes across different modules running on different technologies that may include interaction with legacy systems and external entities such as the suppliers and the customers.

Similarly, these ERP packages allows monitoring and tracking of the workflow by automating it and making it seamless across the entire enterprise. This allows the management to identify and remove, if there are any inconsistencies in the business process.

Meet Compliance Requirements

In much the same way, ERP can help an organization to use the collected data to meet all the regulatory guidelines or report any discrepancies immediately. That means that problems are addressed more pragmatically, reducing the likelihood of failure to meet compliance requirements. Additionally, it gives visibility to an organization into the development or acquisition process and the sales process. The insights so gained by seeing both the current and historical picture — can help organizations better plan for more effective and accurate forecasting and planning.

Process Management

Retail is a tough business to manage. It has a lengthy chain of processes (a moving one) as compared to any other type of business —literally. It requires that a product is manufactured and moved from one location to another, until it reaches a store where it can be purchased by a customer. Even after the purchase, processes and data that may be related to accounting, customer service, or from some other area, keep moving.

And as it is moving, an organization cannot really pinpoint the product’s movements from the point of acquisition to the point of sale and beyond unless if the right data is fetched using ERP software. Only that information can be used to improve the processes associated with the flow of goods through the organization and only if that is done, a retailer can trace every aspect of the journey from manufacturer to final customer.

Also, business can analyze it and put it to use to improve the business processes associated with that journey. Results could later be also used to combine shipments to reduce the price of products, predict their demand and even determine where the quality issues exist and where they might have originated.

Conclusion

There isn’t a doubt now that ERP is a useful tool and that it has the potential to solve ‘n’ number of problems for retailers by enabling them to improve business processes through efficient flow of goods, enhanced regulatory compliance, and accurate planning and improvements.

All You Need To Know About Salesforce Community Cloud

Community Cloud is a salesforce.com initiative and it is how they want to move beyond just sales. As its name suggests, Community Cloud, is designed to connect you with more and more communities related to your business. It connects your customers, partners, and employees directly to the information, apps, and experts they need. In fact, it addresses every specific business need incorporating social concepts in service of sales, support, and partner collaboration. So if you want to tap into communities as part of your business strategy, keep a close watch on the following offerings of the Community Cloud.

Social Engagement  

Salesforce did not address these social and collaborative dimensions initially. But like many other CRM vendors, it wanted to offer some of that functionality to its customers. Later, having realized the significance of social channels for commerce activity and in combating competition, it introduced Community Cloud.

As Community Cloud came into being, it gradually turned into an effervescent community facilitating engagement for customers, business-to-business partners, and employees.

It helped businesses create self-service communities in order to streamline support and foster brand advocates among customers. For this purpose, it appointed service representatives for monitoring the community discussions and had provisions of escalation to the customer service team within Salesforce.com, if matters/queries etc. remain unattended.

Next, the Community Cloud proves useful in improving communications with vendors, creative agencies or alike to facilitate business operations/working.

Personalized Experience, Customization and Branding

Personalizing the community experience gives businesses an added opportunity to enhance existing customer relationships and customization helps them reflect their brand and extend online customer experience. With Community Cloud, it is now possible to create a fantastic, easy-to-use environment that will serve like an interactive extension of the brand.

Community Cloud also help build communities business can use as a platform to ensure that their customers get quick access to the most useful and/or relevant information. And for those customers who become active in the community, it recognizes and rewards with customizable badges that appear in the feed and on their profile. It is also possible, via Community Cloud, to offer

• connections to experts, groups;
• content based on individual interests and behavior;
• endorsing others for specific skills and expertise

For branding, it also helps to create loyal brand advocates who can lessen the support burden on a customer service team by responding to user questions within the community, and their active engagement on behalf of the business can also positively affect the image of the brand.

At a glance, every prospective customers who visit a business’s community can see that the support team is proactive at providing high-quality customer care and meeting its customers’ needs. Since much of this customer service typically is done behind the scenes, it extends into the public community thereby increasing positive perceptions of the brand.

Business Integration: Info & Data

Cloud Community gets you access to all the requisite information (that is also relevant about the topic) in one place. Automatically generated topic pages gather files, discussions, groups and experts into a single page so that all the vital information is easily organized and accessed. Users can even follow specific topics to remain up to date on novice, relevant conversations in the community.

Accordingly, it fetches data (from everywhere) for the communities so that all the members of the community can create and update records and processes. While partners can update opportunities or qualify leads, employees can escalate customer support cases and customers can provide product feedback. Community Cloud offers a rich, branded, and device-responsive mobile experience anywhere. It’s action-oriented and provides mobility, speed and sync across devices.

Conclusion

Salesforce has earned the trust of its customers worldwide. With Community Cloud, they shall have access to the most sensitive processes and data. But as it is a secure, reliable, and scalable platform, it shall make collaboration quite easy and meet the growing needs of every business community.

Big Data Technology Trends in 2015

Until 2013, it was a topic of debate whether “Big Data Technology” was a niche technology best suited for Internet companies or had the potential to go mainstream.  Things began to change and just in a span of 2 years, industry arrived at a consensus – a clear one. So in 2015, we will see the impact of big data across almost every industry sector. Here’re big data technologies trends for the year 2015:

Big data analytic shall address all security concerns

While earlier it was possible, now corporations collect vast quantities of data that is getting increasingly tedious to handle. This data is so highly complex and voluminous that it has quickly outgrown the capabilities of traditional security software. Not just its managing is difficult, but also it is nearly impossible to analyze it, given the fact that most security platforms used currently don’t talk to each other. Moreover, the processing huge volumes and varieties of data is both cost and time-consuming.

In such times, CISOs have started to look at big data analytics as a powerful complementary solution to traditional security software. It offers some clearly distinct advantages as it enables the security infrastructure to identify and fix “low and slow” advanced-persistent-threat outbreaks that might otherwise be indiscernible when protected by security solutions that don’t connect to or relate with each other. This phenomenon is sure to catch up quickly and expand to other sectors.

Fake technologies will no longer be able to sustain

In 2015, buyers are sure to come to a clear understanding that even when these come from experienced vendors, not everything they try to sell in the name of big data technology could help them. For their own good and that of enterprises, they have to choose solutions that are distinct from traditional business intelligence and data warehouse technologies so that it handles (effectively) the volume or variety of data they have to manage. 2015 shall be the year of technology replacement wherein big data analytics will be emerging as a fundamentally powerful next-generation analytics and the preferred choice of buyers.

Big data shall help IoT reach its full potential

There is a huge amount of data i.e. generated by the household and industrial devices, and wearable et al. and it comprise today’s Internet of things (IoT). As yet, hundreds of device makers building the IoT have not come together. So this data, despite of growing exponentially, is lying unused with the device makers.

However, if big data technology is put to use, it can bring this data together so that its true value is realized. It will also involve understanding how devices and services are working, communication flow that could constitute security threats, and intertwining interdependent & dependent failure modes.

This is the first vital first step that should be followed by a variety of analytical approaches. In 2015, device makers will have to turn to big data analytics to help the emerging Internet of things market reach its full potential— or they will be left out if they don’t.

Companies, both big & small, will be moving towards big data analytics

A few years ago, big data tools were available only to corporate biggies that could invest in proprietary and largely inflexible infrastructure. From 2015, companies of all sizes will increasingly adopt it to identify and quickly adapt to opportunities and challenges, if they want to remain competitive, as they rethink the way their employees collaborate and use data. It is expected as companies will be increasingly adopting a data centric approach to set strategy, encourage collaboration among colleagues, and interact with customers.

Big Data vendor consolidation will happen
In 2015, some of these small players in the area of big data, with their niche products, will not be able to meet their customers’ overall needs. So it is expected that many startups will either fail or become acquisition targets as larger vendors who could offer end-to-end solutions would eye them.

Conclusion

These are a number of proof points that go beyond elusive claims to prove that in 2015 the full potential of big data analytics will be unleashed empowering business analysts with new capabilities. So this year shall mark the end of testing and early-stage roll outs and the rise of a ripe big data landscape where we’ll see enterprises making bigger strategic bets and asking for end-to-end solutions built to handle humongous amounts of incongruent data without calling for data scientists. It’s shakeout time.

How to Use Excel – Part II

Create Charts

First you need to enter data into a spreadsheet (or Excel) with column headers. Next, select Insert > Chart > Chart Type. If you are not confident of the type of Chart you should insert, Excel 2013 even has an option for Recommended Charts wherein it shows different types of layout/chart types based on the type of data you’re working with. Once you prepare a generic version of that chart, it could be even customized using the Chart Tools menu. It gives “n” number of options for you to change the Design & Format of the chart, as desired.

Use “IF” formula
Let’s you use conditional formulas that calculate in one way when a certain thing is true, and in other way when false.
For example, in the data shown in the spreadsheet below, you can write “Pass” or “Fail” against each Roll No., depending on the marks obtained by a student. If the marks scored by a student is greater than 60, it will write Pass else Fail against that Roll No.

Use Flash Fill
Before this features was introduced, when you worked with a column having names in “Last, First” format, you had to type everything manually. But now it has made pulling required pieces of information from a concatenated cell easier than ever before. Once you show excel what you want to extract in the next column, it can on its own, using Home > Fill > Flash Fill, automatically do exactly the same. In the example given below, in Column D as I wrote first name, using this feature, it automatically filled the first name of the remaining persons in the table.

Use Quick Analysis
While working with simple data sets, if you use Quick Analysis tool – it minimizes the time you might take to create charts. It shows at the bottom right hand corner as soon as you have your data selected. When clicked, the Quick Analysis menu provides tools like Formatting, Charts, Totals, Tables, and Sparklines. You can see a live preview of each by simply hovering your mouse over each one.

Use Keyboard Shortcuts
F2 – it opens the cell for editing in the formula bar
Control-End – Moves to the last cell that contains data
Control-Down/Up Arrow – Moves to the top or bottom cell of the column
Control-Shift-Down/Up Arrow – Select all the cells above or below the particular cell
Control-Left/Right Arrow – Moves farthest left/right in the current row
Shift-F11 – Opens up a new blank worksheet within the spreadsheet
Control-Home – Moves to cell A1

How to Create Pivot Tables in Excel?

Pivot Table helps you in reorganizing the data in a spreadsheet and/or depending on your specific requirements, it can sum up values and/or compare information.

What you see in a typical Pivot Table?

1.  Report Filter: This allows you to only look at certain rows in your dataset.
2.  Row Labels: These could be your rows in the dataset. Both Row and Column labels can contain data from your columns
3.  Column Labels: These could be your headers in the dataset.
4.  Value: By default, when a field is dragged to Value, it always does a count.

However, this allows you to also do a few other manipulations with any numeric value you pull in, including – sum, count, average, max, min, count etc.

Creating a Pivot table

Step 1: Identify yourself with your data so that you know what needs to be done with it. Once that is done, go to Insert Tab and select Pivot Table.

Excel will automatically populate your Pivot Table, but you can always change around the order of the data. In the example that we have taken, we are trying to calculate the average spend of each country for the products sold.

Pic 1. Excel File With Data

Pic 2: Pivot Table Inserted

On the right side, once a pivot table is inserted – you will see all your column titles from the data that is in in the Excel file. From there on, you can place them into different parts of the pivot table.

Step 2: Organize your data.

To organize this data just drag and drop Title to the Row Labels box.

Pic 3: Showing where to drag your titles in Pivot Table

Step 3: Start doing the calculations

You can summarize the metrics that you want to calculate in the Values section.

Let’s start with Amount.

As you drag Amount into the Values box, you might see, as the sourced data has blank rows at the bottom, that the Total column will show 1s and 2s. By default, this variable will summarize by frequency rather than add up. You can go back and delete the extra rows, or you can add up Amount.

Pic 4: Showing Where To Find Value Field Settings

Taking other approach, you have to click on the arrow next to Count of Amount in the Value box and select Value Field Settings.

Pic 5: Using Value Field Settings

From there, move the highlighted selection from Count to Average and click OK.

Pic 6: Showing Results of Using Value Field Settings

You can do that for each variable and that is how you create and use pivot tables.
Congrats! It’s a feat in itself.

How To Use Excel – Part 1

Doing certain things on Microsoft Excel, such as – merging two spreadsheets having similar data, combining information from multiple cells or simply reorganizing the data for quick answers is almost hassle-free if you know these simple tricks. So before you spend your precious time on counting or coping-pasting data, look for a quick Excel trick and we assure you – you’ll likely find one.

In Part – I of our “How To Use Excel” articles, we are presenting few of the simplest Excel tricks to get you started.

1.  Transpose – Flip rows to columns or vice-versa
Doing it manually would take a lot of time in copy and pasting the data but transpose function does it quickly.

•      Select the rows that you want to transpose into columns and select “Copy” with a right click
•      Now, select the cells on your spreadsheet where you want your first row or column to begin.
•      When you select “Paste Special” a module will appear with an option to “Transpose” at its bottom. As soon as you check that box and select OK, it is done.

2.   Text to Column – Splits information and moves it into two different cells
Examples where it is needed – when you have to pull out someone’s company name from their email address or separate first and last name.

•      Highlight the column that you want to split.
•      Go to the Data tab and select “Text to Columns”
•      A module will appear with additional information from which you may select either “Delimited” (breaks up column based on characters such as semi-colon, commas, spaces, or tabs or @ sign) or “Fixed Width” (helps you select the exact location on all the columns that you want the split to occur)
•      Let’s assume you select “delimited”. Then, choose the space where to break the column. Excel will then show you a preview of what your new columns will look like.
•      If that’s exactly what you want, press “Next.” A page will open that will allow you to select Advanced Formats. When you’re done, click “Finish.”

3.   Add multiple new rows/columns
One of the simplest things to do in Excel and though it is super tedious to do it one-by-one, there is a trick to do it in seconds.

•      Highlight the same number of pre-existing rows or columns that you want to add (highlight 3 rows if you want to add 3 rows).
•      Right-click and select “Insert.”
•      And then you are able to add an additional three blank rows into the excel sheet quickly.

4.  Remove duplicates – Helps greatly when data sets are large and when you just want to see the unique information
Useful especially when – you have a list of multiple contacts in a company but you only want to see the number of companies you have or you have to remove an entire row based on a duplicate column value.

•       Highlight the row or column that you want to remove duplicates of. Then, go to the Data tab, and select “Remove Duplicates” (under Tools).
•       A pop-up will appear and as soon as you confirm which data you want to work with, it’s done.

5.  Filters – From a very large data set, it hides unwanted rows/columns and displays data that fit into a certain chosen criteria

•     You can select “Filter” for each column in your data. You see that option in the Data Tab.
•     Also, you can then choose which cells you want to view at once.
•     Click the arrow next to the column headers and specify whether you want your data to be organized in descending or ascending order, and which rows you want to see.