Excel is fantastic but are you relying on Excel too much and have you adopted to new technology?

Excel is fantastic but are you relying on Excel too much and have you adopted to new technology?

Excel had its 40^th birthday last year. It is the most used software (outside of Outlook) and some teams live in Excel day in day out. In fact looking up the statistics Microsoft say there are over a billion users of Excel. I have personally been delivering Excel training for over 30 years and seen it change from Excel 4 – single sheet files to its current form. 

Does your team have multiple copies of the same spreadsheet or have they adopted working on spreadsheets in One Drive or SharePoint/Teams? Ensuring that spreadsheets are used in the cloud give you the ability to work on spreadsheets at the same time. You can manage the different versions of the spreadsheet and it also acts as a auditable record – noting when changes are made to the data. 

Excel is used often to set up data sources. Using Excel Filters and Table Formats assist you in managing data in an organised way. With Tables you can sort and filter the data easily, but Excel files are quite “flat”. If you can imagine the data in your spreadsheet which you can treat each row as its own record and allow business process to be built in – then research on how you can import your Excel Spreadsheets into SharePoint Lists. Once in a SharePoint List you can set up automatic reminders for date columns, create automations based on values changing and other business processes. 

Another reason for looking at modern apps – is the ability to visualize your data. For years we have created charts in our spreadsheets. They are either objects on top of the sheet, or they become the sheet. Power Bi with Power Query in the background allows you to create dashboards and visual representation of your data which do not “float” on top of sheets and are fixed, but work on slicers to view the same chart but for a single month/year or data source. 

If you have an Excel spreadsheet which is reliant on a single user to manage and build the spreadsheet, this is a single point of failure.  Why not consider changing the spreadsheet into a Power App which will keep data entry the same for all users. Power Apps are Microsoft solution to creating your own app within the software. It can be designed for everyone to enter and review data and manage and use this on any device. 

With over 1 billion users – we are not going to get rid of Excel, but it is time to review – are you using the right tool for the job required and could you be more efficient with moving the data to a new App?