Introducing the Astrato Excel Add-in

Every team that lives in Excel knows this moment. Leadership asks a question, you open the dashboard, and then you export. The CSV lands in a sheet, you filter it, re-key it, and paste it into the Excel file you actually build in — and somewhere along the way, the number in your spreadsheet quietly drifts from the number on the dashboard. 

Same question, two answers, depending on which file someone opened.

It's not that anyone did anything wrong. It's that the data arrived as a dead export — cut off from the live source behind the dashboard. The moment it left the warehouse, it started going stale.

So we took a different path. The instinct across the BI world is to pull people out of Excel and into a new tool. We think that's backwards. Excel isn't going anywhere — finance isn't leaving the spreadsheet, and no number of dashboards will change that. So rather than fight it, we embraced it.

The Astrato Excel Add-in connects Excel directly to your governed data. The trusted numbers that power your dashboards land in the grid as native Excel formulas you refresh on demand — nothing to export, nothing to re-key. You keep working in Excel exactly as you do today, on numbers that match the dashboard and that you can actually defend.

The work was always going to happen in Excel

This is the whole idea behind the Add-in, so it's worth saying plainly. A lot of everyday analysis simply isn't a dashboard job. Pulling a number apart, stress-testing an assumption, shaping a quick view for a meeting — that work happens in a spreadsheet, and it will happen in Excel whether the data behind it is trustworthy or not.

Interactive workflows and shared, operational processes belong in Astrato Data Apps; the ad-hoc analysis and models people build for themselves belong in Excel.

So we don't ask anyone to start somewhere new. You set your data up once, pull it into any cell as a formula, and next month you don't rebuild anything — you refresh. 

Monday morning:

• Open last month's Excel file.
• Click Refresh.
• Every chart. Every pivot. Every model.
• Done.

‍

The board pack that used to eat a morning of exporting and re-keying is finished before your coffee's cold. You built it once. You never rebuild it again.

Model a scenario on live data, not a pasted extract

Some of the most valuable work in Excel is asking "what if?" Normally, every new scenario starts with another export. The Add-in lets you change a growth rate, a region or a date, and re-query trusted data instead. Link a filter to a cell in your sheet, and whatever someone types there — a region, a date, a growth rate — re-queries Astrato underneath. It's what-if modelling on live, consistent data — the kind an analyst runs in their own sheet, now on numbers that match the source.

Send the spreadsheet. Not your credentials.

Credentials belong to the user. Data belongs to the file. Your login is never written into the file — only the data. So when you email a file to a colleague or an executive, they open it and read the numbers from your last refresh straight away: no login, no access request, no exposure of your connection. And it still works on the plane. The last data you pulled stays with the sheet, so the numbers are there even without a connection.

Start with the Excel file you already use

The Astrato Excel Add-in is available now at Microsoft Marketplace. If you're already using Astrato, try the Excel Add-in in the spreadsheet your team already depends on. You don't need a new way of working — just better numbers inside the one you already have. If you're evaluating Astrato, book a walkthrough, and we'll run it on your data.

The best proof comes the first time you hit Refresh: you open last month's workbook, the numbers update, and you realise you didn't rebuild a thing. The workbook stayed. The numbers changed. That's the point.