You're about to leave on a business trip. You've packed your laptop, PDA, e-mail pager and cell phone. Yet despite all of this high-tech equipment, you feel disconnected from your office. After all, you realize that being on the road significantly increases the possibility you won't be able to adequately monitor your business even if you can remotely connect to the Internet.

What if you had a function that could robotically perform some of the monitoring for you-automatically, 24 hours a day, seven days a week-and alert you when it's appropriate?

Well, you probably already have that power--Excel--in your briefcase. Here's how to use it.