Ever get the feeling you’re wasting your breath and no one is listening? I do. For years I’ve been trying to stop everyone in our company from using Excel for everything they can think of. This would be fine except that the majority of this data is just lists of information and the only reason they use it is because the Excel table style view makes it look organised. The other problem is that the users aren’t that organised so there’s stuff everywhere on the network, no one knows which is current and… it’s a nightmare.

I got an email through the other day from our MD with a project to collect information on various organisations and the contacts within them. The brief was very thorough and I like the method he gave us, but the attachment was an Excel sheet with the column headers outlining the information we need to collect. This is fine and if my background was in marketing and business management, I doubt that I would have come up with a better method. Luckily I don’t and all of us with an IT background are thinking about the correct way of doing it - Database.

I knocked one up in Access that wasn’t much more than a front end for the Excel sheet with a few tables to collect the organisation information first, followed by adding a contact and choosing which organisation they belong to. This should save us dozens of hours in cut-n-paste time alone.

So, who’s fault is the Excel obsession? Partly it’s because companies don’t have the resources to provide a database and the training required for the users so people use what they know how to.

How do we fix it? As much as I’d love to uninstall Excel from every machine in the office, I don’t think I could get away with it. Plan B: I’m going to try and become in charge of marketing for Office at Microsoft. I’ve even got a slogan ready:

Microsoft Excel: Use it for adding up columns of numbers!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 10:16 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.