using analytics with microsoft office

BeyondCore for Office - One-Click Analytics for Excel, Word and PowerPoint

Data discovery software BeyondCore automatically identifies Key Patterns in your Data and Creates a Story that Explains the Insights, inside Microsoft Office with its new App; Business users need access to fast, accurate and dynamic analysis in order to make confident, data-driven decisions that will increase revenue, reduce costs, and improve processes. The ability to perform one's own analysis without the reliance on the already overburdened IT department is of huge benefit to every business unit, from Human Resources to Marketing and Sales.; Doubling down on its promise of “Analytics for All", BeyondCore announced the launch of its new product, BeyondCore Apps for Office, the world’s first single-click Automated Analysis solution. This app puts the power of hypothesis-free and programming-free data analysis into the hands of every business user who knows how to use Microsoft Office. BeyondCore’s proven and award-winning technologies are now available in the environment that business users know best.

With single-click analysis and detailed story-based explanations of insights directly integrated into the familiar Office suite, BeyondCore Apps for Office empowers business users to:

  • Manage their own queries, without depending on business intelligence resources or data scientists to produce extracts or reports

  • Fully analyse all of the data, without the need to formulate sophisticated questions or design complex queries

  • Cut through the clutter to identify and act on the most relevant, statistically-sound patterns

  • Distil the essence of large Excel spreadsheets into a fully annotated PowerPoint presentation or Word document with new insights drawn from automated analysis of the data patterns.

  • Visualise, understand, interpret, share, and act on the results

BeyondCore Apps for Office solves this formidable resource challenge facing every business today: as the need for analytics grows exponentially, analytics talent is becoming increasingly scarce. There is a wide variation in predictions for jobs as data scientists - IDC (International Data Corporation) estimated a requirement of 180,000 data scientists by 2018, and another 800,000 people in related jobs, such as data management and data interpretation.

With the growth of big data it is said that every employee in the office of the future will have to be capable of performing data extracts and analysis. This is already happening in Marketing, where some companies have already set up a combination of IT and Marketing, known as "Martech".

It is predicted in some industries, such as healthcare, that the total data for the industry will double every three days, bringing new challenges in data interpretation. Using a data discovery tool like BeyondCore will give users the power to translate the complexity and diversity of such data into meaningful and relevant patterns of data that provide new insights about the business and its customers.

BeyondCore recognised that access to advanced analytics for office workers will become a necessity in a world where AI is becoming commonplace. Accordingly, they developed an application that integrates with a software suite that everyone in the company can use, namely Microsoft Office.

“With BeyondCore Apps for Office, advanced analytics couldn’t possibly be any easier,” said BeyondCore CEO and Founder Arijit Sengupta. “Just as Microsoft has empowered users to do more than they ever thought possible with data processing, word processing and presentation design through Excel, Word and PowerPoint, BeyondCore Apps for Office is adding automated analysis to that list of powerful and user-friendly experiences.”

Microsoft too, are enthusiastic about the application. Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president at Microsoft for the Office 365 Client Apps and Services team, had this to say about the new offering:- “We’re excited to see the BeyondCore Apps for Office. It’s a great example of our modern extensibility model and for delivering advanced analytics in Office, helping people to do more with their data by turning it into insights and understanding.”

With BeyondCore Apps for Office, there’s no worrying about asking the right questions out of the thousands of possibilities, no doubting if the resulting analysis is statistically sound, and no wondering about human bias or error. Simply select the column in Excel representing the revenue, cost, or risk metric you want to understand – and BeyondCore goes to work. Using Smart Pattern Discovery to evaluate thousands of variable combinations, BeyondCore identifies key insights, confirms statistical validity and creates an easy-to-understand story explaining the results—all within minutes.

Results are presented as a PowerPoint presentation or a Word document, complete with speaker notes and narrative to explain each graph. BeyondCore also recommends optional insights that users can add to the document with a single click. They can also specify exactly which graphs they want to add, and BeyondCore automatically applies the same statistical rigor and generates a narrative explanation for the specified graph. BeyondCore dynamically tailors additional recommendations based on the users’ interactions with the story.

To truly understand how powerful this application is, consider how a data scientist would approach the same problem. Firstly, he would have to gauge what outcomes are required and, based on that reasoning, select at least one appropriate artificial intelligence algorithm. A study at Nottingham University to see if artificial intelligence could predict heart attacks as well as, or better than humans applied four different AI algorithms to the study. Each algorithm gave different results (the 5th algorithm at the top is the current baseline). Neural Networks came out tops, and while 3.6% may not sound like much, in the study it related to 355 patients where a potential heart attack or stroke could be predicted that was not diagnosed in the real-life case studies.

Fortunately, a data discovery tool like BeyondCore has removed the barrier of in-depth study of statistics, statistical programming, artificial intelligence and machine learning that would normally be required to participate in finding patterns in big data. The user does not have to know the differences between linear and logistic regression or the Least squares method, he does not even have to know the names of these algorithms to produce meaningful results.

Now users in Sales, Marketing and Service can extract predictive analytics for themselves. Here are some of our own managers with stories about what Einstein can achieve for them in predictive analytics.

“Analytics today is fundamentally a manual hunting process. The onus is on the user to ask the right questions, conduct the necessary statistical tests, interpret the graphs correctly, and take the most impactful actions. BeyondCore eliminates this heavy burden,” Sengupta said. “It reduces the risk of human errors and the distracting ‘data noise’ that could send you down a very wrong path.”

BeyondCore’s breakthrough technology is based on eight years of research and two years of development, backed by ten issued and more than a dozen pending patents. The software has been used by 21 Fortune 100 companies and has been cited by Gartner, McKinsey and others for its groundbreaking approach to empowering business users with analytics.

Get started with BeyondCore Apps for Office  today.

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