Be it a million dollar company’s manager or housewife handling
finances electronically, excel spread sheet has spread its use in every corner
of our computing environment. Perhaps it’s the most used software tool to
manage project, data, visualizing and reporting tables and charts since last
decade. Regardless of organization size, excel could be a tool employees open
as often as the email. This made me wonder whether we need extensive software
systems or excel is enough to manage projects and data.
First let’s get down to the basics and consider the 3 main advantages
of excel sheet.
Free: Well, it comes with the office package, but
it’s already installed in the computer and ready to use! Most of the companies
use Microsoft office. This could be one of the reason Excel is used widely.
Easy to use:
Excel is always at your fingertips. Do you need to copy data? Do you need pivot
charts? Or perhaps any type of charts? Excel is right there for you. And forget
about the training, excel is as basic as alphabets in computing world.
Presentation: One of the main reason everyone uses excel is
because the data that is stored can be presented easily in different formats
like charts and tables. You can also send data to your manager within minutes
or copy it to the PowerPoint slides.
While this seems like perfect reason to bask in the glory of
excel as software tool, changing computing environment is posing many
challenges in the way we operate project and handle data.
Data security:
Deleting a row or column is as easy as lifting finger, in an excel file. Combine that with human error and no control
over who-updates-what, you have ticking bomb situation for your data security.
Data errors: Long
formulas and no control over data templates can lead to erroneous data input.
Maintaining audit log of what, when and who has changed data would be a
nightmare.
Mobility and
Collaboration: While the whole world
is moving towards cloud, sharing the excel data and keep it up to date is a
clumsy task. While opening excel in any
mobile device is convenient, maintaining a project and updating the records are
not easy. Since the data is stored locally, collaborative computing would pose
different set of problems like concurrent update, loss of original data etc.
Scalability: As
the organization grows, systems get more distributed multiplying all the
problems mentioned above exponentially. This would lead to departments managing
data locally. Collating data from multiple departments for overall reporting
would require a full time resource.
Compliance:
Combine above points and you get a big headache of non-compliance in your next
audit. In all regards, spreadsheets are created for individuals to manage data
and in no way suitable for agile business practices.
It’s easy to get locked up in the spread sheet tradition,
rather than investing on possibilities and benefits offered by professional
systems. But it’s also vital to break
free from it, to move forward in the emerging computing industry. At PsiberTech, we believe in customized
solutions for your needs. Contact us to know how you can translate your current
excel documents into meaningful, intuitive and easy to use apps.
Best
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