For many businesses, spreadsheets remain a major tool. While there are several business intelligence solutions hitting the marketplace, the use of a system like Excel is still popular.
In a recent guest column for Hexus, Michael Meeks, the general manager of Collabora Productivity and leader of the LibreOffice team wrote about several technology trends that are affecting the current landscape. One of the areas that he touched on is the fact that spreadsheets are bigger than ever.
“A significant portion of spreadsheet documents are created to help make business decisions, and they’re used for things the original creators of the format never imagined,” Meeks wrote. “Their performance has, for many years, been directly correlated to what you were doing with them, and how much CPU horsepower you had to hand.”
He added that the understanding of what spreadsheets can do was limited to specific areas of the business and access to large amounts of data to process was often limited as well. However, all of this is changing quickly.
Larger chunks of data are easier to store and Big Data is making things simpler and cheaper. Users are becoming more aware of the ways they can manipulate information and combine different sets to create something usable. All of this requires a mastery of the spreadsheet that many do not have.
With the help of an Excel programming and training service, businesses can examine the way that they are currently using spreadsheets and look to see what steps need to be taken to push the service to the next level.
