It seems like I’ve earned a reputation at work for hating Excel.
We recently had a workshop with different stations and flipboards about how to improve some processes etc. And well – I added a lot of “less spreadsheets” sticky notes. After a while someone approached me and asked what my problem with Excel was – if I maybe just don’t know how to use it.
But no, my reluctance to spreadsheets comes from the very bad experience together with automation. Let me explain: Very often, Excel (or any spreadsheet) is used as a not-very-well structured database in some process. And whenever you try to add more automation to this process or want to re-use the data, we come to one of two scenarios:
The Excel Graveyard
Excel files were used to gather data. These files are saved in some location. Usually for documuentation purposes. and there they are. Usually not very reusable. In the worst case, some of the spreadsheets were individualized. This is what we call the Excel-graveyard. A lot of information that was gathered and entered usually in manual labor. It’s like a database of data that’s just not available as a database …
Sometimes, the same information is gathered for different purposes from different people and stored in different places. And then we have .. redunant information – disconnected from each other. And updated in different ways (if at all). And after a while we have the samme information in different locations in different stale states.
The information would have been better kept in a database! but then someone would have to be the owner of some master table – and people would need to design the raw structure of their database(s) and maybe even need to align on some master-table(s).
But for each unit it’s simpler to just create their own excel graveyard.
Excel as an Application
And sometimes, a spreadsheet is a live database of a certain step in a process. Fields are updated, data constantly beig updated, and either it is sent to the next step in a process or data is copied in & out into ANOTHER application or spreadsheet.
OKAY let’s automate this part / process! But then you have a look at the spreadsheet – and then have your O-M-G moment. A mess of tables, pivot tables, diagrams, tables-next-to-tables within one sheet, inconsistencies, magic-color-coding and a lot of specialist know-how.
And this is what a colleague recently very well declared as “This Excel should be an application with a database“. Yes people would loose some degree of freedom. But by enforcing just some constraints, and putting it into a “real” database, automation would suddenly become ways more possible and robust!
BUT, people would have to change their way of working. Accept to loose total freedom and maybe think more in a database way of organizing the data.
Yes I know: Claude can do it all. Ah well, in most of the cases … until it doesn’t. And in every podcast etc, I hear “better test it beforehand in a safe directory”. Well – we aren’t talking about some home projects but about enterprise processes. A “it usually works” is NOT really acceptable. I’d rather use Claude/whatever-AI to build the application-frontend for this database!
Spreadsheets have their use – and not
I still dislike filing spreadhseets for the sake of gathering information into a Excel graveyard. Yet, I admit that – of course – they have their uses. But oh man, all too often they just make automation of processes so much harder …
Leave a Reply