Why would you care?
Excel is a brilliant spreadsheet: but a liability when it is used to drive business processes.
Excel was designed (in 1987) to help users create, organise and analyse data. It was single user, stored data locally and didn’t maintain a record of who changed what when.
It was not designed to be:
An asset register
An expenses system
An order tracker
A business mileage tracker
An HR system
A risk register
An inventory control system
A list of credit checked customers
The list goes on…
Whilst Microsoft have changed some of the underlying limitations, Excel is still not designed to support business processes. When used this way spreadsheets get very complicated, tough to maintain, support, and easily corrupted. Using Excel for these purposes cause low level friction within the business: a productivity issue. It is also a governance issue. When it goes wrong – it goes really wrong. An order can’t be processed – or personally identifiable information is distributed outside the business.
How Would You Know if Excel is Being Used Incorrectly?
Lots of internal emails have spreadsheets attached.
Some debate about who has the latest version.
Stuff not being possible “until Bob gets back” – because “he owns the spreadsheet”.
You have to make a report to the Information Commissioners Office because someone attached the wrong spreadsheet to an email.
Ask your IT team to identify the five largest Excel files stored on your network – ask them who last updated them, and go and ask them why. What purpose do those files serve?
What Alternative Application Should Your Team Use?
Excel isn’t the only Microsoft product that gets misused. Microsoft Access (a database product developed at around the same time) suffered in the same way. The public sector was the worst offender. Users found that it took too long to procure solutions to their business needs, – they used Excel/Access to solve their immediate problem. Years later Excel was being used to record the details of all manner of things – from Tanks (the camouflaged ones) to Office Leases.
Having spotted the problem Microsoft developed a solution. PowerApps. This is a tool designed to build “lite” business applications. If you have a requirement – and can’t justify the expense of a specific business application when you only need 30% of the functionality that these products provide – PowerApps is likely a better answer.
How TSG Help
If you would like to know more about PowerApps….
If you are already a TSG customer – check the Academy schedule. We run regular training sessions that can help your team explore what the tool makes possible.
Alternatively, talk to us about the business problem you are trying to solve – we’d be happy to quickly work up a proof of concept with you.
