Excel Reports On Resource Usage In New Calendar Browser for Outlook

In a few weeks kalmstrom.com Business Solutions will release a new version of Calendar Browser, our resource booking tool for the Outlook calendar. One of the important enhancements in version 8 will be the integrated Excel Reports.

With Calendar Browser you cannot only offer an easy booking in the Outlook calendar of rooms, cars, maintenance, lecturers or what ever resources your organization needs to have available for the staff – you can also study the bookings over time and make sure the resources are used efficiently!

Archive and analyze
Calendar Browser uses resource calendars for booking, so to book a resource is as easy as to make an appointment in the personal Outlook calendar. There is a search feature that shows free resources for the time you need them, and each resource can be described with text, images and links.

For managers Calendar Browser has an archive features for old appointments, Outlook calendar bookings that have already been used. This feature saves the old appointments to a database and creates various reports on them. Earlier Calendar Browser had another reporting tool, but in version 8 we will use Excel reports.



Use all Excel features
The reason we have switched to Excel reports is that they are easier to use than the old tool. Excel is a powerful platform for statistics and reports. and most managers already know how to use it. If not, there is a multitude of tutorials on the net. The Calendar Browser Excel reports are standard Excel reports and can be used with all the functionality of Excel.

Excel is also very suitable for use with other Microsoft platforms, which further increases the benefits of using Excel reports for the Calendar Browser statistics.

Many standard reports
Calendar Browser creates two sets of Excel reports from the Outlook calendar bookings, Cost reports and Appointment reports.

The five Cost reports show costs for resources and the supplies that can be booked with the resources.

The seven Appointment reports display various other aspects of the resource usage, like how many hours each resource has been booked or the number of resources used per project.

The default reports may be changed, and the changes can of course be saved. Both pivot tables and graphs are included, and with the inbuilt Excel graphic tools you can make nice presentations, like the one below on cost for resource usage per organizer.



Custom reports
We believe that the default Calendar Browser reports will be sufficient for most organizations, but if needed managers may very well create custom reports from the data in the database.

Just select a new sheet in the Calendar Browser Appointments or Orders reports file, add a pivot table and customize it as you like. Then save this report, and next time you archive appointments your custom report will be refreshed with the new data just like the default reports.

You are welcome to read more about the upcoming version 8 of Calendar Browser in two earlier blog posts,   from September and October.