While it may not be the most sustainable approach for expansion and growth, it's hardly surprising that companies often choose to maintain their critical business data in a cluster of Microsoft Excel files. After all, spreadsheets are powerful and versatile tools for both storing data and transforming it into information. Unfortunately, much the time saved by organizing data in a few compact places often seems to be unnecessarily wasted by constantly shuffling it around in cells, manually updating formulas, and trying to keep track of all those internal and external references ("#VALUE!", anyone?).

So if you're going to use Excel to track the most sensitive information in your organization, you may want to consider making your life easier - and your work more efficient and precise - with BizInsight 7 (formerly BizDesktop Edition). BizInsight works directly with Excel to supercharge your traditional reports, making them more dynamic and useful than they've ever been before. "How?" you ask.

Stand in the middle of even the laziest stream, and you'll soon notice that the water around you doesn't ever stand still. Like the data in your organization, it comes from many sources and remains in perpetual motion. Trying to consolidate and organize all of that constantly-shifting information in manually-maintained Excel spreadsheets is like trying to hold the water firmly in your bare hand. If you did need to gather the water together and put it to some purpose, you'd find a better tool. Why not take the same approach with your data?