Spreadsheets- Friend or Foe

Who uses spreadsheets in their job? Do you use them everyday? Are you a giver of spreadsheets or a receiver? If you're a giver of spreadsheets how much time do you spend preparing them for your audience? If you're a receiver of spreadsheets do you find yourself tinkering with it because it doesn't quite give you what you want. If you're a receiver of spreadsheets, how many times have you opened the wrong one, or made a decision based on the previous version (which was wrong!). How many times have you opened a spreadsheet and it didn't refresh from the linked spreadsheets embedded in it or it crashed your machine?

If you answered YES to any of the above, your role and your organisation should be using better tools. All of the above are common scenarios that happen all too often. If you're the Head of Sales and you are building spreadsheets that analyses your teams performance or use it for budgeting and forecasting that's not the best use of your time. Don't get me wrong, Spreadsheets are great, but they are not the best tool for managing analytic processes that are repeatable, distributable, scalable and secure.

What do I mean by this?

Repeatable

Every week (or whatever the cadence) You are required to take multiple inputs (all the stores send you a sales spreadsheet, or you download a sales report from finance). If your spreadsheet process is repeatable you need to get it into a system that takes care of the handle cranking activities, That's what machines do best. It needs a structure or boiler plate approach so you don't have rebuilt your Taj Mahal spreadsheet every week.

Repeatable tasks are consuming and not the best use of human time.

Distributable

There are multiple recipients of your spreadsheet, They may be internal or external. Either way- you need a system that either automatically emails the output to them or alerts recipients that it is ready. Ideally you want to let your users decide whether they want a copy of the output or they are happy logging into a system to check it.

Scalable

As time goes on, any report that is time series based is going to have more and more data. This means your spreadsheet is going to get bigger and bigger, slower and slower. Get it out of your spreadsheet and automate it.

Secure

Is your spreadsheet secure? do you lock it with a password? Probably not as it's too much hassle, you have to share the password. If you're emailing it around that's probably not so secure, and if you're storing it on a file server then is the location secure, Are there other documents in the location that are confidential? Does the current location of your spreadsheet compromise security of the other documents in that folder?

Spreadsheets are Foe

For me Spreadsheets are mostly foe for all the reasons I listed above. Don't get me wrong, I have built some killer spreadsheets. My Mona Lisa of spreadsheets was a 42 sheet behemoth was used to track performance for an $80 Million dollar company and each week we would tweak and adjust it to suit. Would I still do it this way today? The answer is no. And for most people their answer should no.

The answer is better tools.

What's the answer? The answer is better tools. Tools such as TIBCO Spotfire, Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI. These tools requirement an investment in time and money, The cost of these tools today is so low, the main cost really is time. Most people don't want to spend the time and use the cost of the software as an objection, when the real objection is time. Common objections can be "I don't have time, yet they continue to waste their precious time (which is a limited resource) cranking over the spreadsheet handle. Another objections (and most people won't tell you this to their face) is that if you take away their spreadsheets and make them more efficient- they will fear that their job is on the chopping block. When all you have done is open up opportunities for deeper faster analysis and individual growth.

I could talk about this all day, however I think I have made my point, if any of this resonates with you and you are stuck in Spreadsheets, drop me a line or message, I'm keen to listen and help.