Knowledge Base & Tutorials
Spreadsheet & MIS Reporting Guides
Practical, actionable tutorials designed to help analysts, small business owners, and Excel users build accurate, executive-ready reports.
Data Hygiene7 min read
How to Clean Dirty Spreadsheet Data for Accurate MIS Reporting
Learn proven spreadsheet cleaning workflows to eliminate whitespace, reconcile inconsistent date formats, and avoid skewed MIS dashboards.
- Inconsistent trailing whitespace in category columns creates fragmented groups like 'Retail' vs 'Retail '.
- Mixed date formats (DD/MM/YYYY vs MM/DD/YYYY) corrupt monthly time-series aggregations.
Visualization6 min read
The Practical Guide to Choosing the Right Chart Type for Business Data
A business analyst's guide to selecting Bar, Line, Donut, Scatter, and Boxplot charts based on data cardinality and analytical intent.
- Time-series with 5+ data points should always use Line or Area charts to preserve temporal momentum.
- Categorical comparisons with fewer than 15 items belong in horizontal Bar or vertical Column charts.
Business Analytics8 min read
How to Calculate Sales Growth, Margins, and Category Concentration
Learn the core mathematics behind executive sales reporting, including variance to target, MoM growth, and category dominance analysis.
- Month-over-Month (MoM) growth calculations must include safe-divide guards to handle zero-base periods.
- Profit margin is Net Profit / Revenue, never Net Profit / Cost (which is Markup).
Spreadsheet Security5 min read
Preventing Common Spreadsheet & DDE Formula Injection Errors
Understand Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) formula injection in CSV/Excel files and how OpenMIS automatically sanitizes exported reports.
- CSV files are plain text, but Microsoft Excel executes cells beginning with '=', '+', '-', '@' as formulas.
- Malicious formulas can trigger Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) to run external system commands or exfiltrate local files.