Why Replacing Microsoft Excel is Worth Money to a Boss?

Microsoft Excel is everywhere you look in the business world. Mostly, in areas where people are dealing with numbers a lot like marketing, business development, sales and finance. Sometimes your boss may be finding it irrelevant because every business owner wants this software to make calculations and data analysis easy. Unfortunately, even after paying a lot for Excel, there is no way to trace data location, no audit trail and no easy way to test spreadsheets for starters. Apart from these there are 3 major reasons that suggest your boss to replace Excel.

Spreadsheets are time consuming and expensive

Microsoft Excel is paid software and mainly people use it to spend money, deal with IT and the purchasing department. No doubt Excel has so many features or capability to complete all your calculations or data analysis but that will not work automatically, you need to build it by creating formulas and references, formatting output and more. Creating spreadsheets is time consuming and cost money.  Also takes significant time to maintain, while adding new values it may cause an error in process.

If you want standardized reports you need a devoted staff to perform, that costs more to company. But by using some appropriate or advanced tool, that same task can be performed by one or two computer.

Spreadsheet error leaves business open to risk and liability

You know that every business contains Spreadsheets in hundreds or thousands so it’s very common to find error in one or two cells. These minor errors can cause trouble in business. Your clients, management and regulators may be affected by any error and there may be costs to you in lost revenue, damaged reputation, fines or litigation expenses.

When spreadsheet creators leave, knowledge leaves with them

Microsoft Excel is the computer program which can be created in different way by different developers. Sometimes, they use elements to make professionally-developed software desirable such as:

• Designers with a great understanding of user needs
• Review designs to prevent errors before the software built.
• Well trained developers use appropriate processes to work efficiently and minimize errors in the end product.
• Quality assurance to ensure the program does what it’s supposed to do.
• End user testing to detect and fix issues in the product before it gets into general circulation.
• Documentation to provide user guide manuals to end user.
• Product roadmap to plan the future development needs.

Over time, the people who made the spreadsheets make changes without keeping any record of what they have done.  Then, they move on to another company and nobody who is left behind knows what that spreadsheet really does. In case of any error, that creates really tough and complicated situation. But, that boss can avoid this situation by replacing Microsoft Excel with more appropriate analytics tools and processes.