Excel Alerts Explained — Thresholds, Severity & Real-Time Monitoring
Excel is excellent for analysis, but it has one major limitation: it cannot alert you when something important changes. ThresholdIQ fills this gap by evaluating your data, applying threshold rules, and generating real-time alerts — all inside your browser.
What Are Excel Alerts?
Excel alerts notify you when a KPI crosses a threshold. But Excel itself has no built‑in alerting engine. ThresholdIQ evaluates your data and fires alerts instantly when conditions are met.
Severity Levels
ThresholdIQ supports three severity tiers:
- Warning — early signal that something is trending in the wrong direction
- Critical — serious deviation requiring attention
- Emergency — immediate action required
How Threshold Rules Work
A threshold rule defines when an alert should fire. For example:
Direction: below
Warning: 10000
Critical: 8000
Emergency: 6000
If the KPI falls below these values, the corresponding alert fires.
Rolling Window Evaluation
Instead of checking each row independently, ThresholdIQ evaluates KPIs inside a rolling window. This reduces noise and produces more stable alerts.
Deviation Scoring
ThresholdIQ computes how far a value deviates from the threshold:
deviation = value - thresholdThis helps rank alerts by urgency and severity.
Why Excel Alerts Matter
Alerts help teams:
- React faster
- Prevent failures
- Automate monitoring
- Reduce manual spreadsheet checking