The universal solution Excel?

How many times a day do you think Excel (or Google Sheets) are opened? The answer of most officer workers is: constantly! In my daily work as a consultant, I often see that even business-critical processes are mapped in Excel. Even though I appreciate Excel for many things, it is unsuitable for most processes. After all, it is only a complex calculator, but not an integrated system that can manage data as effectively as possible.

Excel is still seen as a universal solution in many offices. All data and figures are managed in it, but is that still up to date? From vacation planning to annual financial statements, from budget management to commission accounting - Excel has to be used for everything. In the meantime, there are much more effective and efficient tools with which data management is possible.

Is Excel still up to date as a universal solution?

Historical excursus - Excel as a general purpose tool

With the introduction of Excel in the late 1980s, Microsoft fundamentally changed the way we calculate. While many people used to work with pocket calculators in the office, Excel became the new state of the art. The possibilities were almost limitless - complex calculations, averages, formulas - everything was suddenly so easy. With a little practice, any office worker could quickly design and calculate complex models. Invoices, delivery bills and the like were also created with Excel. The program became the universal solution, the all-purpose weapon in companies. But let's keep in mind that a lot has changed in the past 30 years.

In the last two decades and with the advent of the Internet, the demands on data management have increased steadily. In the past, item numbers, a name and the price were sufficient. Today, many people would like to store pictures of the products, for example, to use them for the online store. Here, Excel can only act as a mediator, but cannot fully manage the data of a company. There is also a lack of linkage with other programs. Today, moreover, there are often more people working in data management, and we know what happens when everyone is working in the same Excel spreadsheet: Chaos ensues. Data is rearranged, filtered or even deleted. In the meantime, there are numerous SaaS platforms, such as Airtable, that can take over data management excellently and make Excel superfluous at this point.

Excel can only act as a mediator in data management.

Limits and opportunities - Excel vs. SaaS platforms

In my opinion, the main limitation of Excel is that it cannot manage different media types. This means that it no longer meets the many modern requirements for data management, such as exchange with other systems. Excel is still a gigantic calculator with memory function, which certainly has its justification in some places, but it is not a modern tool for data management. Even though many companies have already recognized the limitations of Excel themselves, they lack alternatives.

If you want to develop your business technologically, you need modern tools that are well networked with other systems. Opening and closing Excel spreadsheets, uploading and downloading files, and making changes manually are not processes that allow automation in the long term. While there are very powerful automations in Excel as well, especially with Visual Basic Applications (VBA), they are still based on legacy constructs. SaaS platforms like Trello, on the other hand, are geared toward modern business. Here, data can be easily and quickly entered, managed, shared, linked to other documents or images can be stored. Whether it's members, locations, deadlines or comments - everything can be found clearly in one place here, making data management easier and more up-to-date. With such efficient tools, fewer errors occur, you find what you're looking for faster, manual work is eliminated, and thus speed increases as well.

Modern SaaS platforms are more effective and efficient than Excel.

Is Excel still good enough?

As much as I still love Excel myself and use it for numerous tasks, one should question whether it is still "good enough" for the tasks at hand. For example, with the help of tools like Airtable, a cloud-based collaboration service, you can better map many data topics, and also automatically feed them back into various systems. The supreme discipline is a customized, enterprise-grade system that maps individual business processes as efficiently as possible. This leads to more transparency, speed and control and opens up new possibilities for actually using the collected data.

Conclusion - Excel is standard, but that's all it is

Excel is standard in every company. It makes our work easier in many places and has a great raison for existence. However, we should realize that there are now many out-reaching tools that can be used to work faster, more efficiently and more effectively.