A friend confided to me recently that her company sometimes felt like it was "held together with spreadsheets". It’s a common enough saying and I took it to mean that their IT systems were a bit home-grown and some investment was probably in order before things started to go wrong.
In my experience, IT departments view end user-written spreadsheets with disdain and seldom support them. They’re not secure, they’re frequently shared, copied and broken, and it’s been estimated that 88% of all spreadsheets contain errors (Penko, May 2008). So although Excel is surely the most used (and possibly the most popular) software in the world, the generally held view is that it's the wrong thing to be running parts of your business with.
But if my friend had gone on to explain that these spreadsheets were professionally written and fully supported, then my impression would have been different. It would have suggested to me that her company was sensible and cost-conscious, making good use of the power of software they’ve already paid for.
So why is it that Excel is seen more as the problem than the solution? Personally I think the answer lies in the history of Excel as an end-user application and the fact that it’s sold as part of Microsoft Office. And although Excel’s power and flexibility isn’t exactly a secret, it’s fair to say that it isn’t aggressively marketed. Instead it’s left to a band of dedicated enthusiasts to champion its virtues, but their audience is largely other Excel enthusiasts . . .
It strikes me that the Excel community needs to rise to the challenge to reach out to business and IT leaders instead of each other. There’s a revolution afoot in the world of Excel and Power BI, and everyone should benefit.
Share your views and experiences. Have you seen Excel used particularly well somewhere? Do you think Excel and Power BI will ever be embraced by the business community?