End Excel Abuse Today
End Excel Abuse Today
November 9, 2013 By Tim Cimbura 2 Comments
Excel spreadsheets are great. They can perform a lot of useful tasks for your business like general purpose number crunching, tracking customer contacts/information, making custom invoices, and producing charts. But many businesses push spreadsheets to their limits. They come to rely on Excel for far more than it was ever designed to do. We call this “Excel abuse” and it’s a big business problem.
We know companies that employ people whose sole job is to format and maintain Excel spreadsheets. They spend hours pouring over information copying and pasting between workbooks to assemble reports and summarize information. They do this repeatedly month after month wasting thousands of hours of valuable time. We know companies that have struggled with the accidental deletion of a cell in the middle of a spreadsheet that destroyed the integrity of their data. We know companies that manage hundreds of Excel worksheets that are difficult to summarize and are not easily sharable. Various versions of these worksheets get emailed around and you don’t even know which one is the most up-to-date.
Smart companies realize they can be more profitable with a more focused off-the-shelf application that automates this work for them. So they spend a lot of money on an application that they hope will end the struggle with Excel. Often, this new solution still doesn’t fully fit their business process or is too difficult for their people to use and fit into their current work environment.