What's Wrong with Excel?

What’s wrong with using Excel?

Any time ERP is being discussed, Excel is a sore point. Excel is a niggle, an elephant in the room or an outright argument in the context of all sorts of systems, actually, in reporting, management, whatever.

What I notice is that there are often strong entrenched views in which neither side, pro-Excel or anti-Excel really understand each other. It’s a fight over something else that neither side quite acknowledge.

The core fact is that Excel is an extraordinary tool. It can do so much, in such a variety of ways, that it’s almost no exaggeration to say that at least in business terms it can almost do everything.

I was using Excel long before I got involved with ERP, and got deep into the VBA side, the code scripts below the surface of what most users see, so I know what it can do. I have made full standalone applications within Excel. And they stayed the way of doing those things for years in the places I worked.

So, if it's great, what's the problem?

The perfect use for a spreadsheet has at least one of two key factors, preferably both:

1. It's for and by a single person.
2. When you're done, you're done.

Given those, Excel is great. Analysis, preparation of data, calculation. For you, or to pass on to someone who needs it. There's little better.

Collaboration, as most people find out, is less ideal. Google Sheets and Excel online can be used collaboratively, but there's an art to doing so successfully, and a lot of that art is in knowing the limitations and when it's worth doing at all.

Similarly, a spreadsheet that tells us something is brilliant, but one that has become an entire history starts to be a drag in various ways. A constantly-updated spreadsheet, or one with versions dating back to Dave who set it up in 2014, is the little piece of wood under the table that otherwise wobbles. It's not doing anything wrong in itself, but it's a sign of something that hasn't been fixed.

Horses for courses

When techy types complain that "Excel is not a database", they aren't saying you can't use Excel for data.

Databases, which are what ERP systems are built on, are optimised for scale and concurrency. What that means, in plain English, is that as more people use them more, and all at the same time, they keep working and stay consistent. So ERPs are the same, and if someone in the Finance department calls up the figures that the factory floor is working on, right now, both can rely on those numbers and not be held up. Spreadsheets aren't like that, and aren't intended to be, because they are optimised for flexibility.

And that's the trade-off of teamwork in general, isn't it? If you want to do what you like, work alone and let your genius flow freely. When you work with others, you gain all their capability as well as your own, but need some basic agreed rules so you're not all pulling in different directions.

Which points to the real main reason those with a broader view – managers, consultants etc – tend to worry when spreadsheets become a critical part of how things are done. It might be completely fine, but too often it's a sign of individual workarounds in situations where standardisation and sharing would be better.

But how can we tell?

My rule of thumb is: if you need to know something, and you don't make changes to the ERP system as a result of your Excel work, you're fine. Export from the ERP and do what you need. If you're doing it regularly in the same way, you might want to think about alternatives to make whatever-it-is more efficient, but no harm is being done.

If you pass the file around, or others are dependent on it or what you tell them from it, or data is fed back into the ERP, you have a problem even if you don't realise it. And you might not be uploading the data, necessarily, but adjusting things by hand based on your spreadsheet, which is as bad.

In those cases, the system that's running the business is blind to exactly those things, which means that people can't know what they need to, in ways that may not be clear to you.

The table isn't wobbling right now, maybe, but ... someone is resting something vital on outdated data, things only work because one particular person has a way of doing it that only they know, and maybe hours a week are going into something that should be happening automatically.

So what can we do?

Well, you can call META eight, for one option.

What action you take (or we take for you) depends on what the underlying reason for the spreadsheet-in-the-process is.

Sometimes it's a lack of trust in the ERP data. Missing data, or suspected wrong values. Or even data pulled from elsewhere, like a supplier product or price list, or a map of delivery areas, that was never added or connected.

Sometimes it's missing functionality or logic that doesn't exist in the ERP, so somebody has to do it another way.

Sometimes it's really only that it's either easier, or people don't know how to use the ERP itself for something.

So there's no one simple answer, and it usually starts with some detective clue-gathering, and unthreatening queries of people who know the realities of the actual work. The technical answers flow from that, when they're needed.