At dinner parties and other social occasions I attend, it’s common for the topic of discussion to end up as “work”. When I tell friends that our company makes a “multi-dimensional financial modeling tool”, I often get a quizzical look and plenty of bemused follow-up questions.
Many of our users find themselves in the same predicament when talking about Quantrix with colleagues and co-workers. In this blog post, I explain four key concepts of Quantrix in plain language to help us all do a better job evangelizing this great product we have.
Dimensions as nouns
The most important concept to grasp the multi-dimensional aspect of Quantrix. A dimension is often represented by the nouns used to describe the model you want to build. For example: We are a manufacturer of products and we want to model unit sales growth over time across the different regions we sell to. Those nouns – products, regions and time – make up the three dimensions you are going to build into your model. It becomes much less confusing and more approachable when you think of model dimensionality in this way.
Plain language formulas across dimensions
Once you have the dimensions established, then you can write formulas across these dimensions creating tremendous formula efficiency. Often, one formula can do the work of thousands and thousands of cells. Anyone can understand that maintaining one Quantrix formula, instead of thousands of spreadsheet formulas, is a huge efficiency win and greatly reduces the likelihood of errors.
Slice and dice
It is so easy to move dimensions among the three axes to get a different view of your data, all the while you have the ability to continue to model and adjust formula logic. We call it ‘always on pivoting’ – and it’s a truly powerful concept.
Data
Modelers all have a need for data, and this is usually provided through manual hand entry, csv imports or even direct feeds from large database systems. Through built in data connectors and JDBC technologies, Quantrix can hook up to virtually any data source quickly and easily with minimal IT involvement.
I sometimes hear people use the phrase “Quantrix is Excel on steroids”. I tend not to use that wording as it diminishes the power of the Quantrix application. Quantrix is so much more powerful, and easier to use, than a spreadsheet. We are a professional tool our users can use to create very dynamic data presentations and gain valuable insight… that is often simply not even possible to do in a spreadsheet.
Quantrix stands apart on its own merits.
So, the next time you have a chance to tell someone the good news about Quantrix, keep these four points in mind!
