Report Mining, Analysis Improved in Monarch 4.0
Datawatch Corp. (Wilmington, Mass.) released Version 4 of its Monarch report mining tool, offering new reporting and analysis features that make the product easier to use and faster to deploy.
Monarch, the report mining technology behind such AS/400 products as BCD’s (Hinsdale, Ill.) EZ-Pickins and Spool Explorer/400 and Vanguard Systems’ (Media, Pa.) Bookworm, now offers an enhanced template definition interface and six additional append levels to help users work with complex reports. This version can read wide reports, up to 1,000 characters per line, and reports formatted with ANSI, as opposed to ASCII, characters.
“Our existing users gain the ability to deal with more reports on the input side, especially the troublesome reports they couldn’t handle before,” says Mark Peterson, senior VP of North American operations at Datawatch.
The user interface has been enhanced, particularly with the addition of a new Field Definition Wizard that examines a report and automatically paints fields with proper field boundaries. Performance has been enhanced for sorting and applying filters in the Table Window and the Table Window interface itself has been enhanced, along with Monarch’s sorting, printing and display formatting capabilities.
Version 4 of Monarch extends the portable report file (PRF) format to include summary data and filter keys, making summaries and filtered tables instantly available when users open the portable report. Summary tabs in Monarch V4 provide a visual interface to multiple summary views. In addition, summaries no longer inherit the active filter, so users can now apply a specific filter to each summary.
New summary options include the ability to compute the minimum, maximum, average and percent-of-total for each key, accumulate values for unspecified keys, and itemize detail information at the lowest drill-down level. New charting options include the ability to resize the chart pane, stagger and break legends, format chart titles and create point charts.
“We support higher and more sophisticated levels of analysis,” Peterson says. “We have a lot of new features for spreadsheet jocks who really like to dive in and do a high level of analysis.”
Monarch remains a horizontal product, geared to report-intensive industries like banking, health care and financial services, he notes.