The industry-leading spreadsheet software program, Excel, can be a powerful data visualization and analysis tool. Learn intermediate Microsoft Excel skills to enhance your knowledge and improve your effectiveness while adding value to your position and organization.
Law enforcement agencies often have large data sets that can be difficult to interpret and process. Using Microsoft Excel to sort, organize, filter, and simplify these data sets can accelerate investigations.
Scheduling
Police scheduling is a time-consuming process. Many agencies use excel spreadsheets for their schedules, but these can be messy and ineffective.
Whether you are trying to manage 24/7 patrol shifts, monitor minimum staffing requirements, handle overtime, or handle community requests for extra coverage, you need the right software to make it easy. That’s where Snap Schedule can help!
Our law enforcement scheduling software combines anywhere access, shift schedule automation, time clock, payroll integration, reliable statistics, and robust reporting functionality into a streamlined schedule management solution.
Hundreds of law enforcement agencies use our shift scheduling app nationwide to ensure officers are scheduled accurately. Our self-service features let officers request time off, bid on or trade shifts, punch in/out, update availability, and more!
Dispatch
Dispatch centers need to be able to track staffing levels and make sure they have the right number of dispatchers on shift at any given time. They also need to know who is assigned to which shifts and how many officers work back-to-back.
Stearns County SO Dispatch Center, for example, was using detailed Excel spreadsheets to manage staff scheduling for 14 police agencies and several smaller surrounding towns. Communication Sergeant Michele Burke understood the importance of having this information available to her staff at all times.
Thankfully, PlanIt Schedule is familiar with these problems and created a suite of pre-configured Excel templates that can help you manage staffing levels quickly and easily. The team’s years of experience working with police scheduling software has given them a keen understanding of what departments need and how to design schedule templates that meet those needs.
Investigations
Many law enforcement agencies receive large volumes of data from multiple sources. They often have to sort, organize, filter, simplify, and normalize this information before using it in their investigations.
One of the best tools for this type of work is Microsoft Excel, which can help investigators, prosecutors, and forensic examiners sort, organize and mine this information. A new, self-paced online course from SEARCH’s High-Tech Crime Training Services Program offers tips and tricks for using this program to streamline the process.
Another helpful tool for law enforcement is Analyst Notebook, which provides users with a tool to help them discover networks, patterns, and trends from massive amounts of data from several sources. This tool is especially useful in analyzing various data types, including cell phone call records, GPS coordinates, and other forms of cellular connectivity. It also allows investigators to plot these data points on a map, which can greatly value case development, investigations and courtroom presentation, and prosecution.
Training
Law enforcement excels spreadsheets can be useful tools for gathering, working with, and analyzing data to enhance investigations and reports. This training course is designed to train law enforcement personnel on leveraging Microsoft Excel to help them gather, work with and analyze large data sets and manage their information.
This course also covers how to present critical information to officers and their communities through Sway, which allows users to create presentations that can be accessed through any device quickly. The course demonstrates using PowerPoint and Excel to analyze crime patterns, trends, and problems.
Consider using a shortcut to speed up the process when entering data into a spreadsheet. For example, many financial institutions export their bank statements to Excel directly.