Microsoft Excel is extremely useful for a lot of things and is very widely used throughout the accounting and finance industries and for good reason. It has numerous extraordinary templates that can be used in literally any situation. Do you need to do an expense report? There’s a template for that. How about a cash flow statement? Yep, it’s got one of those too. It can be so useful that I’m sure you’re flabbergasted at my suggestion that it isn’t right for you, but I’m right, unfortunately, and here is just a few reasons and examples of why.
1. Excel is just really slow
When working with larger sets of data than it was perhaps designed for, Excel gets sluggish and very slow. It is a shame but it does mean that for larger business they will struggle to get all the data that they need to in the spreadsheet. This also means that for any marketing business, they can very quickly and very easily gather more data than it can feasibly use. This means you would have to use numerous spreadsheets, making your data messy and disorganized. Instead, use a better dashboard software like this.
2.They can be difficult to analyze
For the lay person, looking at an Excel spreadsheet can be very disheartening. They get a bad rap with users and that immediately turns people off from using and looking at them, which is unfortunate, to say the least.
Worse than this, however, the sheer volume of data can lead to users misrepresenting what they see and then making bad business decisions based on bad data representation. It is also very simple and often used to misrepresent data with graphs and charts.
3.There is no real-time sharing
In this day and age, businesses are international and require their data to be available to any relevant user no matter where they are.
Whether this is a user in the field, or on another continent, it is extremely awkward to share the data with those who are outside of the office. These spreadsheets usually end up so large and unwieldy that they are only shared once a week. This leads to out of date data and incorrect analyses. Other programs like Google’s Data Studio 360, allows real-time sharing and is an all around better program for smaller businesses.Google is updating their tech constantly.
The list goes on
Along side with these reasons, there are many examples of Excel being shared with important hidden data still within the spreadsheet. Here is AstraZeneca who accidentally shared confidential data when it was embedded within an excel spreadsheet, this was then distributed to outside analysts.
For these reasons and much more, I honestly believe, as do many others, that Excel is just not right for businesses anymore. It is lost in the stone age of technology and who knows, the future may even be robotic.
