A recent article from Business Excellence makes the case that using Excel is costing your business millions of dollars. The main argument is that spreadsheets are static and that is not enough for organizations in the current digital day and age. However, the rest of the article is filled with inaccuracies that do not highlight all of the strengths of Excel.
As a response to this, Matt Allington penned a column pointing out all of the problems with the article and talking about the benefits that using Excel brings to a business. While he agrees with the main takeaway that spreadsheets are static, he points out that the rest of the piece is filled with misleading information and attributes problems that don’t exist.
According to Allington, Excel is a powerful tool with solid dashboard capabilities built in, which include PowerPivot, Pivot Tables, Slicers and conditional formatting. The modern versions have a powerful suite of capabilities, and are flexible, cheap and agile enough to present data almost any way that one could want to see it.
Any system can be a drawback when those using it do not understand what they are doing. However, Excel worksheets have been a standard solution for organizations for as long as they have been for a reason. Companies just need to make sure they understand how to take Excel and push it to the next level.
This is where the help of a service provider that specializes in Excel training can help businesses determine how Excel can best help their organization and ensure they use it correctly.
