Stop Excelling!

Perhaps the greatest thing since sliced bread, Microsoft Excel, seems to be the answer to anything a small business needs to do with their information. From mailing lists to tracking sales contacts to actual financial analysis, I have seen spreadsheets used for just about everything.

I admit I use MS Excel frequently, but I also use accounting software, customer relationship management, Word, Outlook, and many other applications that are better solutions for a given task or data set. I use Excel for calculations, financial analysis and comparisons, data conversions and of course, graphs. So when is Excel the most effective solution?

To Excel or Not to Excel, That is the Question

The answer depends on the task at hand. Excel is a spreadsheet, columns and rows, and although that is a great presentation of information, it is a difficult design for data entry.

If you are using Excel as a contact management system, with your list of contacts including columns of name and address information, and then a cell in a column way over on the right with notes about your phone calls, it is time to think again.

Maintaining data in this way is tedious, can get unwieldy quickly, and lends itself to potential data entry errors. Having to scroll left to right and back again to get the information you need it not efficient. Consider contact management or customer relationship applications (local or online) which are true databases with data entry forms.

Excel is not a bad choice for housing mailing lists, but again, not the best format for maintaining or adding to them. Many databases will export into a format that is easily opened in Excel giving you more access to the data. This will let you clean up the information as it is easy to copy and paste in a spreadsheet that in a database.

Additionally, there are many formulas that will help make data more consistent without having to re-enter it. For example, there are formulas that will turn the text from all caps to other formats; formal upper and lower case, all upper case, or all lower case.

It is also not uncommon for several people in an organization to be working on similar spreadsheets without even knowing it. This typically happens when there is a centralized database, such as a contact manager, customer relationship manager, or even a “home grown” MS Access set of tables.

Exporting information into Excel is simple, and may initially seem like a faster way to get the information in the format you want versus learning how to accomplish that in the application where the information resides. Unfortunately what you end up with is a series of Excel spreadsheets that only hold partial information or multiple incarnations of the spreadsheet based on what information is most important to the person who originally exported the data. The best solution is to create several custom reports or views within the database to enable everyone to see what they want, when they want, without having to move the data to Excel.

How Much Do You Excel?

How much time are you spending in Ms Excel? If you ever have more than one spreadsheet open at a time and you are working back and forth between them, or the information is incomplete, you are actually not excelling at all, are you?