Excel leads the data crunching in many businesses. But does it? Let's find out!

The slightest negligence in maintaining or typing records could make companies suffer hefty losses.

We are so obsessed with using spreadsheets that we often forget to understand how Excel has drifted away from being the superstar of the business. In the past, it used to be the standalone tool that maximized productivity and provided large sets of information on a single database. The project teams adopted Microsoft Excel to create presentations, dashboards, and analyze data sets. Launched in 1985, it has acquired millions of users worldwide; however, it has faced difficulties retaining the trust of organizations. In a world where thousands of companies are rapidly growing their profile and moving into a fast-paced work environment, Excel hasn't been able to identify the needs of big business enterprises significantly.

Excel spreadsheets are not a good solution for your business. Anxious to know why?

While Excel is the most robust and compatible program, its inefficiency in managing large amounts of information with accuracy and reliability has proved to be the biggest letdown. The spreadsheets formed in Excel are fragile and do not hold any accountability due to the high percentage of errors stimulated while organizing and implementing data. The structural interface is not user-friendly, and thus large numbers are often rounded off for calculations leaving an array of compromising accuracy.

Is it the sole reason for not choosing Excel?

Let’s see:

Its program is not resolute for collaborative work:

Imagine a work scenario where the organization's offices are in different locations, yet the information available in Excel needs to be processed through various departments. Pinpointing that the right message goes across throughout the organization becomes highly critical. In such a case, the only option for sharing valuable information is via email. The team members lose track of the multiple documents sent back and forth in the process, leading to duplication and presentation of misguided information.

Vulnerability to Fraud/ Corruption has increased massively:

Information lacks in-depth analysis, and the tendency of businesses to rely on manual entry has increased the potential for errors and miscalculations. Employees often have complete control over the spreadsheet, which gives them the headway for misplacing numbers, leading to fraudulent charges and corruption. Millions of dollars have been lost while sustaining large firm's excel files as changing methods, values, and descriptions have become readily accessible.

It doesn't offer Any Security:

The cost of prioritizing security on Excel wouldn't be enough to provide complete assurance of maintaining the records intact; thus, it would not be an ideal composition to lean on the program for your businesses' confidential data. The lack of verification against your company's data would make it troublesome for skilled analysts to delineate errors for rectification/modification. Additionally, Excel doesn't offer any adequate security protocol or infrastructure for keeping information secure under your organization's initials.

Here's a familiar example of how Excel has failed to identify the multiplying needs of businesses and why such mechanisms are challenging to operate.

Organizations handling their data through Excel face innumerable complications while measuring the accuracy and standards of the company's performance. It is basically due to the lack of uniformity as it takes much time to extract numbers and logic into formulas of the whole database. The probability of making decisions promptly diminishes due to complexities in the functional structure of the data. Supposedly, if and when a new person comes and takes over the large-corporate transition, spreadsheets would be so personalized that the individual would have to wiggle his/her head around from scratch.

In 2012, an Excel miscalculation of after cells cost JPMorgan Chase approximately $6.2 million.

A trader's account was required to be averaged rather than added, leading to a steep decline in profits. This particular tragedy is famously known as the London Whale incident. Here you can observe how the slightest negligence in maintaining or typing records could make companies suffer hefty losses. Thus, Excel is often not the best solution for analyzing, drawing charts, and reiterating calculations.

So, What's the Alternative?

Building your integrated cloud-based software from the existing spreadsheets is vital for updating and organizing records instantly. You will avoid the copy-paste jargon, subsequently decreasing the probability of incurring consistent errors. It would form a systematic platform for getting the latest updates about finances, stock updates, and the company's performance. Everyone in the organization would have readability access to the same version of information, eliminating any duplication and miscommunication within the departments.

Over the years, Excel and Google Sheets have overridden the market for the best-known spreadsheet applications. Due to its high-end maintenance capability and accessibility over multiple platforms, Google sheets has emerged as one of the effective alternatives to Excel. The differentiation between the two is their compatibility in collaboration. Different versions of Excel have made work collaboration extremely hard, whereas Google sheets are primarily built for integrating and collaborating diversified businesses over one platform. Creating a secure yet permissible database with proper and perpetual tracking features is not a bridge too far that the companies should seek investment.

Mistakes in calculations, double-entry, and misplacing decimals are some of the typical organization's errors causing millions of pounds of damage. Lately, Excel has wavered out of favor due to the endless combination of mistakes. Building your advanced cloud software is the way to move out of the complexities of fixing data issues.

Amit Gupta?is the author of the book?Reclaim Your Market Share with Modern Data Analytics, who writes about business growth, business intelligence & entrepreneurship. He is the Director of?Techginia, which provides Business Intelligence & Data Analytics Solutions.