Five reasons spreadsheets hold back businesses

Most businesses have developed an over-reliance on spreadsheets. It’s time to kick the habit.

Reason 1 - Spreadsheets are not collaborative

Spreadsheets by their very nature do not promote collaboration. They are individual files which only one person can have open at a time. How many times have you tried opening a spreadsheet from a shared network drive only to be told someone else already has it open? In larger businesses this happens far too often.

The other issue about them being single files is that they need to exist somewhere. For most businesses securely sharing files amongst colleagues still poses a number of issues. How to guarantee secure and fast access? How to deal with people working on their own devices?

Sometimes these frustrations are enough to make people wait until they’re back in the office, which is fine as long as no one else has the file open!

Reason 2 - It’s too easy to make mistakes

Spreadsheets are highly flexible. This is one of their greatest strengths but also one of their greatest weaknesses.

Whilst some formatting constraints can be applied it is still too easy to make mistakes. Data formatting rules aren’t controlled centrally but rather in the document itself. How do you update the general formatting requirements for a spreadsheet if users have already downloaded it?

Since spreadsheets typically show all the available data it is very easy for users to accidentally change other fields and records. Fixing these mistakes costs time and money.

Reason 3 - It’s difficult to get company-wide business intelligence

A business typically has a number of spreadsheets covering various business functions or groups. This poses a logistical problem when it comes to generating business-wide intelligence.

What usually happens is a manual process of gathering all the spreadsheets together, copying and pasting data into a new spreadsheet and then building specific reports.

This might be fine for one-off reports but how do you provide real-time business intelligence?

There’s no obvious answer with the traditional spreadsheet approach.

Reason 4 - You need special software to open them

Whilst this sounds obvious it’s worth considering the impact of this. Workers are increasingly needing flexible access to critical business information. Sometimes installing the relevant spreadsheet package isn’t an option. Alternatively, perhaps one of your colleagues has used specific functionality which isn’t available in the version of the software you’re running locally. Or maybe you’re off-site on another device and want quick access to information without installing your entire work productivity suite.

The need to have specific, potentially non-standard, software installed can be a real barrier to getting the job done - not to mention the secondary issue of the associated software licensing costs.

Reason 5 - They don’t work well on mobile

They really don’t and they probably never will. Due to the way spreadsheet software has been designed historically and the very nature of spreadsheets themselves, they just don’t play well on mobile.

I’ve spoken about the importance of mobility in the workplace before so I won’t go through that in detail here.

If you’re looking to stay agile and competitive you need to make sure your key business systems are accessible to your mobile workers.

This isn’t a nice to have any more.

Moving forward what should we be aiming for?

A few goals to get us started:

1. Everyone can access data at the same time
2. Smart forms prevent data entry mistakes
3. Automatic dashboards provide quick data analysis
4. Everything works across desktop, tablet and mobile

If businesses deploy the right technology to achieve the above they can see significant boosts in productivity, which in turn can facilitate new business models.

We’re in the process of doing just this for a global business that currently manages key financial information across dozens of spreadsheets. We’re moving them to a web and mobile ready solution powered by our business apps platform Calls9 Nucleus.

Once this work is complete I’ll share an in-depth case study explaining the issues they faced, how we fixed them and the benefits they’ve experienced.

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Thanks for reading!

I’m the CEO of Calls9 and we provide software and services to drive business growth.