Excel Hell

While Excel (and Google Sheets) is the most popular tool for analyzing data, it has several shortcomings that hinder the growth of an organization.

It’s great to use for quickly exploring data or doing “back of the envelope” calculations, but like an envelope you can only cram so much data onto it before you run out of space or you mistakenly reference an outdated version of a file by confusing it with all of the other similar looking files.

Here are some of the top limitations:

  1. Manual Effort: Spreadsheets tend to require a lot of manual exporting of data from sources and then manually importing that data into the spreadsheet. Then, comes the real tedious fun of manually manipulating the data to clean it up, unify sources, de-duplicate records and model the data to fit your business. Your wasting your team’s time on all of this busywork that goes through the same processes each time.

  2. Slow Performance: As the spreadsheet gets bigger and bigger, it starts to run slower and slower until it becomes completely unusable.

  3. Risky Sharing: It’s hard to share spreadsheets with others safely without risking loss of data, accidental changes causing issues to go unnoticed and confusion over which version of a file is the most recent/correct.

  4. Deadend: Spreadsheets are a deadend for data and insights. In order to activate the data or take action on insights, someone has to manually take steps on external tools/platforms.

  5. Risky Dependence: Organizations rely heavily on the spreadsheet maker as the glue between sources, formulas/metrics and data transformations.

  6. Complex Formulas: Definitions of your business metrics are hard to read and prone to human error.

  7. Poor Security: Spreadsheets (even with passwords) are quite susceptible to being stolen by hackers and held ransom.

  8. Version Control: Tracking how spreadsheets change over the time is light years behind the best practices of software/data engineering.

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