NEW Excel Sales Forecasting v1.0 released

Joannes Vermorel

I am very proud to announce that Lokad Excel Sales Forecasting v1.0 has been released. The add-in for Microsoft Excel comes as a significant enhancement of Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting. Special thanks to Sergey Fassonov that has been the lead developer for this release.

Let me first explain why the Excel Sales Forecasting was needed. Desktop Sales Forecasting is a nice stand-alone application but it is suffering many limitations:

• there is no built-in no data persistence: if you close the application after retrieving your forecasts, the data is lost. One can argue that it was possible to copy-and-paste into Microsoft Excel in order to store the data; but then why not do everything from Excel directly? This is the approach taken in Lokad Excel.
• the application was essentially limited to a single report. Indeed, in order to get a new the report (like changing from monthly to weekly forecast), it is necessary to change the Lokad Desktop settings. With Lokad Excel is become possible to create (and store) as many sales reports as you wish directly into your spreadsheets.
• there is no support for custom sales data. Being an open-source application, it’s still possible to directly extend Lokad Desktop; but this approach requires some C# coding skills and it’s usually overkill. With Lokad Excel, it is now possible to load sales data directly from an Excel spreadsheet (in addition to all the supported applications).

As a nice bonus, through Excel Sales Forecasting, it is now possible to leverage our forecasting technology with all the capabilities of Excel. More to come on the subject, stay tuned …