Are you still creating reports like the good ol’ times?

Not so long ago, Tom, the marketing analyst, needed to gather all of his clients’ data into an Excel file by manually exporting reports from various systems: Facebook, Adwords, Bing, Google Analytics and so on.

Exporting in CSV format. Importing all files into Excel. Guessing what the %@#$ date format was.

That was the dark ages of reporting. It was almost worse than the bubonic plague.

Surprisingly, even though many tools appeared on the market to make the job easy, many marketers still proceeded the old fashion way.

You don’t need to do that anymore.

Actually, please, stop. Immediately.

It’s like using a land line phone with a rotary dialing system. Are you old enough to have known that? Maybe you recall such weird equipment at your granpa’s. It was great while it lasted, but we can’t imagine using this now.

Creating your reports manually is pretty much the same thing. Stop living in the past and start showing some love to modern tools, like DashThis!

Can your outdated Excel files do the following?

• Connect to several APIs to extract data for you. That’s right, you connect your accounts, the tool does the job to get the right data automatically.
• Update and maintain your reports while you sleep. Once the report is created, you don’t have to touch it again, except to add comments and insights.
• Get all your reporting data in one single place. You can show data from different data sources into only one marketing report. No need to create a multi-tabbed Excel file anymore.

Simply put, you’ll get better results using modern tools in a fraction of the time and frustration than you use to do with Excel.

In short, if you still use Excel to create simple reports, you probably still own a VHS recorder. The good news is that it’s not too late to change and move to something more adapted to today’s reporting tasks.