According to Microsoft, there are approximately 450 million Excel users. I don’t doubt it. Excel is a flexible, easy-to-use, readily available tool. It might be the best piece of software ever created from the perspective of productivity gained per hour of training.
As amazing as Microsoft Excel is, however, it is not a panacea for every work task or problem throughout your company. For example, many companies have their employees using Excel spreadsheets to track time. This is quite ineffective for a number of reasons. First of all, you have to have each employee send you a separate Excel document containing his or her timesheet. You can bet that they will each figure out a way to change and customize their sheets, and Excel makes it hard to govern this.
There is also no approval mechanism or ability to prevent changes to an Excel document once it has been approved.
The process of emailing large spreadsheets also clogs communications channels and necessitates backup space usage on servers and tape drives. In addition, there are data security risks. Spreadsheets are hard to protect. Password crackers for Excel are available for free on the Internet.
Since Excel is so pervasive, the application feels ‘free,’ but there is manual overhead required to administer all of this. It’s like an iceberg - the effort you don’t see is causing a large problem, hidden under the surface.
The bottom line is that if you’re running your business on Excel today, you might want to consider something cheaper, like a real timesheet system.
- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO