Helping you to manage spreadsheets

June 2009

Many organisations rely on using spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel, for their business-critical data and information. Excel is easy to begin using and is an incredibly powerful and flexible tool. But that's also part of its downfall: it's easy to break and can quickly become unwieldy.

Often, it's when you begin using Excel to store large amounts of information, in other words as a database rather than as a spreadsheet for doing calculations, that it becomes difficult to use and maintain.

This article provides an overview of how First Line can help you make your spreadsheets more reliable and easier to use.

So why doesn't Excel work well as a database?

When it's used for storing significant amounts of data, Excel can get very big very quickly. Files can become slow to open, slow to update, and frustrating to use. And as businesses grow, there are increasingly times when more than one person needs to open and make changes to data at the same time. Excel doesn't allow this.

With Excel, or any other make of spreadsheet, it's easy to accidentally delete data or a formula out of a cell. And if you delete something that's part of another formula in a big spreadsheet, it can take you ages to trace it back and rectify it.

How can First Line help?

We can help you in several ways:

1. We can show you how to develop more robust Excel spreadsheets, with simple tricks like locking away or hiding important formulae.
2. We can help you with more advanced programming. For example Excel is good at automatically generating quotations, reports and other complex documents.
3. When spreadsheets needs to shared, businesses have a number of options. Often, it makes sense to invest in a commercial application that's been designed specifically for a business area. There are numerous good and affordable 'off-the-shelf' packages available for accounting, sales, marketing, finance, HR, supply chain and other business functions.
   
   However, for information that's unique to your business, for example product or service data or sales models, it's unlikely that you can buy an off-the-shelf product.
   
   For your unique information, replacing spreadsheets with a simple database application not only gets around the weaknesses of Excel, but can also provide you with more powerful and helpful ways to view, report and manipulate data. It can be made more secure, more reliable, more stable and scaleable, and generally more useful.