When you think of Business Intelligence (BI) reporting tools, PowerPoint might not come to mind. Here are some great reasons why PowerPoint deserves to be in your kit of BI reporting tools.

1. Ease of Use
2. Data Connections
3. Dashboarding
4. Total Customization
5. Add-Ons

Ease of Use

PowerPoint is great for BI reporting because:

1. No Need to Buy: You likely already have PowerPoint as it is included in most versions of Microsoft Office.
2. Easy to Use:  PowerPoint is very simple to use and you probably already have people on your staff who are capable of using it.
3. 1,000s of PowerPoint Templates: There are thousands of pre-made PowerPoint templates you can access. Here are some of the free PowerPoint templates we have created for you.
4. Many Custom Designers: Since PowerPoint is so popular, there are many creative designers around the world that can help get you the look you want. Find out more about custom PowerPoint designs here.

Data Connections for BI Reporting Tools

You can connect PowerPoint to a data source using an add-on called DataPoint. DataPoint will connect your PowerPoint presentation to data sources like:

• RSS feeds
• .csv files
• Excel spreadsheets
• MySQL data
• XML files and more

The benefit of connecting to your data feeds is that your presentation is always up to date with the latest data.

BI Dashboards for BI Reporting Tools

One of the major problems with BI reporting is that the data we need isn’t all in one place. To get a clear picture of where your business is going, you need a BI dashboard that pulls all the information together from a wide range of sources like:

• Google Analytics
• Accounting software
• SEO tracking software
• HR software
• Customer support software
• Online survey systems and more

PowerPoint can be a powerful tool to aggregate information from these multiple reporting tools and can pull them together into a BI dashboard that lets you flip through each slide to see where your business is excelling or struggling.

Custom BI Reporting Tools

With PowerPoint, you can do extensive customization on your reports and you can pull the information from nearly any data source. This can be used to create reports on  such key performance indicators (KPIs) as:

• Revenue growth
• Country growth
• SEO rankings
• Brand awareness
• Conversion rates
• Web site traffic
• Social sharing
• Customer satisfaction and more

With PowerPoint customization you aren’t limited to the data from just one source. You can pull them all into one system that automatically updates with the latest data.

PowerPoint BI Reporting Tools Add-ons

Because PowerPoint is so widely used in the business and enterprise world, there are a many PowerPoint add-ons available to extend its functionality.

This includes some PowerPoint add-ons that can be used for BI reporting. Here are some examples:

1. DataPoint: connect your PowerPoint dashboard/presentation to nearly any data source
2. MessagePoint: deliver your latest KPI results company wide via screensaver
3. NewsPoint: Use Google Alerts and/or Google Trends in an RSS feed to update mentions of your brand or products anywhere on the Internet in real time.

Summary

PowerPoint can be your “go-to” tool for pulling together all your BI reporting data from a wide range of resources into one powerful, automatically updating presentation. You can set up slides for sales, human resources, competition, customer satisfaction and any other metric and easily distribute them to your team. If you would like a free initial consulation on how to add PowerPoint to your BI reporting tools, contact us.