Will "Save to Excel" save yourself?

"Save to Excel", "Download to Excel", "Export to Excel", and many many more similar buttons populate websites and more or less famous business process management software (ERP as the SAPs, the Oracles, etc....). To be honest, stealing a joke from one of the Excel Guru I follow, 'Export to Excel is the third most common button in data and business intelligence apps… after OK and Cancel'.

Why am I writing that? Mainly because I've been spending the whole day yesterday trying to find a way to make the month end process 'leaner' and the only solution I could find was exporting to Excel, automating the process and preparing all the reporting there. Neither the General Ledger software, nor the reporting tool could give me the same flexibility, and by the way they are both Microsoft products too :)

I have to say that in the last years Microsoft has done a great job with the most common spreadsheet software in the world, adding literally more power to it with the PowerBI tools. However, I still reckon it is not yet considered a great skill being able to use and exploit this software, even though it is so common and widely known. Could it be the reason why it is taken for granted that everyone in a finance department could play with VLOOKUPs and SUMIFs?

So, is Excel the beginning and the end of this story? To make things a bit closer to the reader's experience, let's talk about Mary, ACME Ltd. financial accountant: she works in an 8-hour shift, every month end from 9am until 4.55pm she manually builds a GINORMIC spreadsheet. And then, from 4.55pm until 5pm she actually looks at the results and writes a (very) short memo for her boss. Did she really spend the day analyzing the figures? Was she really able to give her manager a proper analysis of the results? or did she spend the day on data manipulation? Does it sound familiar?

Simply put, Microsoft Excel may be not the final answer, but it is definitely the main tool everyone in finance should master to get the work done earlier, faster and to spend more quality time (whether it is private or professional quality time is another story). By the way, I say finance because it is what I do, but as far as I know it is widely used in many other offices, as marketing, HR, biotech, IT itself... You don't need to be a beancounter to become a spreadsheet guru!

So, what do you think? Write any comment, observation, tell me about your experience, feel free to be thought-provoking. In the meantime get more insight on Excel, invest on yourself and improve the output of your work: save in excel format and save yourself from the rigid schemes of your business software!