My name is Radu and I am passionate about Excel. So much that I have a blog in Romanian with more than 100 posts about Excel and also one in English in which Excel is the most popular category. You can call me an Excel fan.

Yes, the title is correct, I want to talk about 5 cases in which I wouldn’t use Excel.

But Radu, everyone tells us that we should use Excel, and that the Excel is the coolest thing invented since the toothbrush?

I told you I am Excel fan, however I think you will agree with me that it’s not best at everything, nothing is. That being said, I`ve seen many people which use Excel for other things than it was designed.

Let`s take an analogy, if we have enough skills and creativity we can use our computer mouse crack open nuts, however it will be a little bit more difficult and less efficient.

The same is with Excel, is very good at some things, but for other things we may have other solutions which are better. Here I made a list with 5, want to add to the list, please do.

1. When I want to take notes

When I say notes, I don`t mean 7 words in 3 cell, I mean a whole paragraph. If you do that, you’ve probably noticed that it’s quite hard and you are limited in formatting text, and if you haven`t learned the ALT + ENTER “hidden secret”, well, bad luck.

When I was a student, in a student organization, I even tried to make a sales offer in Excel. After I saw that look different in each version of Excel, I said forget about it.

I recommend instead (this one is a “shocker”) — Word, and for more informal notes Evernote.

2. When you want to map out processes

Maybe you received an request from the “almighty executive” to make a sketch of process X in the company. The things we have to do …

You can try out diagrams in Excel, and you can also crack open nuts with your external hard drive. If you really want to make some cool diagrams you should try MS Visio.

An alternative for those with want to go open source is Google Drawings, hey I remember using it to make a sketch on how to seat people on my wedding. Good memories ☺.

3. When you want to manage tasks

Excel does a pretty good job in this sense, especially if you use tables. However, it is quite difficult to set your “reminders” in Excel or be notified by email when someone else has assigned any task. I’m not saying that it’s not possible, I know VBA can do “magic”.

Here we have many alternatives, Todoist (using it, liking it), Wunderlist (had used it) and even Trello. If these 3 don’t work for you, I’m sure that you will find one that will, there is no shortage of task management apps.

4. For reports that change constantly

Some companies must really like email, I am saying this because they choose to keep some reports in Excel and keep everyone up to date by sending the report by email, daily, hourly …

And by this way they get 7–8 emails per day with the same document. Sounds good, right?

It’s clear that Google Sheets offers a much better alternative, even Microsoft got the idea and now it and provides real-time online collaboration through Office 365.

5. For appointments

I read blogs about Excel, told you I am an Excel fan. One thing that I saw in many places was a New Year calendar made in Excel. What’s the point? Why keep your appointments in Excel?

Calendars can be useful when I want to print them out and stick them on the wall (to know how much there is till the holydays). However, in terms of appointments, clearly calendar apps are more useful.

I used Google Calendar for a long time, I am now using Sunrise, it just looks great.

Closing

I like Excel and use it for lots of things. However I don’t think that its the solution for everything, probably nothing is.

On the other hand, Excel can help us to do many things, if we know which buttons to push. This is why I blog about it on freshcomputerskills.com and excelninja.ro.