Microsoft Excel, disturbance or a source of creativity in your business?

As a very powerful tool, how your business uses Microsoft Excel is mostly dependant on the skill level of your staff. You might use it simply to organise your thoughts and processes, to keep products, customers or suppliers data in it, or as a very expert user, to create your complex financial models using VBA.

As a software professional, I see many companies using complex Excel templates that they have created over the years - bespoke to them - with a lot of validation rules and visual presentation of data. Knowing the limitations of Excel, I always admire what they achieve but I can’t help thinking about the pain they go through and the potential they miss everyday!

One worry is having multiple concurrent users access the files. As Excel is a file based system it can only be accessed by one user at a time. So shouting out in the office for the file to be closed by another user who has it open, becomes the norm! Multilevel security on different parts of the files is a wish that won’t come true! Role-based permissions to update different parts of the file won’t happen! And frequent backups and rollback points are not possible!

Most of the time, moving away from Excel towards building a bespoke Web or Mobile application is the inevitable solution that will become a source of creativity in a business, as how Margaret J. Wheatly, the organisational behaviour consultant says: “The things we fear most in organisations - fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances - are the primary source of creativity.”!

Accessible everywhere, with secure control over the multi-users access even at the field level, more flexible and reliable with frequent backups of the database and the application, user-friendly and modern; Bespoke Web-based and Mobile applications could be the best replacement of your Excel files which served so well so far.

Migrating an Excel spreadsheet to a bespoke software application is not only a desirable decision which will bring in new opportunities to the business but also an inescapable solution when an organisation has become heavily reliant on the data kept in the files and/or when multiple users need to access and process data concurrently.

You decide if you want to let Excel files keep being a source of frustration and limitation and cope with it or take your business to the next level of growth and creativity!